


There but for the Grace of God

by MagnoliaAnaglypta



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:14:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28693770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagnoliaAnaglypta/pseuds/MagnoliaAnaglypta
Summary: What if no one died during the Caretaker's abduction of Voyager?
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> After having read so many takes on the 'what if Cavit' survived scenario, I realized I'd have to do one myself. It started out from the thought that it was really extremely lucky for Paris that all the people that really really hated or despised him died in one fell swoop, not to mention the Chief Conn officer whose job he would take. So my story starts from the premise; what if no one died during the Caretaker's abduction of Voyager?
> 
> Warning; there are missing characters in this story, the reasons for which I hope will become obvious.

Lt Veronica Stadi watched as Tom Paris took Voyager out of orbit and headed her towards a spatial anomaly they had just detected on the edge of the long range scanners, an anomaly that might just be a wormhole leading to the Alpha Quadrant.

It was late night on the ship. At the main Ops station Harry Kim was standing, running routine scans of the area. B'Elanna was manning the Tactical station at the other side of the bridge, and Stadi sat in the captain's chair, in charge of the bridge. There was no one else on the command deck.

This was the place Stadi liked being best - and these were the people she liked being with. As a career pilot, she would rather have been at the helm, but there was another sort of pleasure in sitting on the command platform, queen of all she surveyed, watching three of the most talented people she'd ever met, in or out of Starfleet, working around her. She had never had any ambitions towards captaincy, which was just as well given their present situation because she was likely to spend the rest of her life on board this ship, and she was quite well down on the seniority list, with a young and long lived Vulcan in line before her. That said, with this tiny subsection of the crew, sometimes she felt she could have gone anywhere and done anything. They worked as a perfect team, interactions between them crisp and in synch, just as they taught you in Academy, but as very rarely happened in real life. Ensign Harry Kim, young, wide eyed and so perfectly Starfleet it was almost painful. But he knew his job, and he knew the technology which constituted Voyager's information and control systems backwards and inside out. B'Elanna Torres, intense, impulsive, resentful. There wasn't anything she couldn't do with a propulsion or power system and frankly it was a damned shame that she wasn't chief engineer instead of that idiot, Lt Commander Ziegler, or at least his second in command instead of unimaginative, by the book Lt Carey.

And Tom Paris, scruffy, tousled, with an enthusiasm and a sense of fun which was infectious and lifted her spirits after a hard day under the humorless and unyielding gaze of her own senior officers. Stadi watched with a slight twinge of envy as he navigated through an unlikely conglomeration of obstacles, displaying a fluency and a sheer talent that she knew she didn’t possess. He was a fabulous pilot and it was more than a shame that he didn’t wear the uniform or was part of the official Con team. It was an act of criminal negligence – not by her, but she knew well enough who was to blame – that instead of the red and black that was his due he wore crumpled, work stained overalls that hung off his frame and denoted his status on board as the lowest of the low. Only with her did he get the chance to fly. Only with her did B’Elanna get the chance to work on the bridge at all. Only Stadi and Kim had any real status on this ship and with Lt Commander Cavit in charge of all work assignments, there was precious little that even she, as senior flight controller, could do to affect policy change. Or anything else. The ship operated the way Cavit ordered it would operate and dissension of any kind was not tolerated. 

Watching the bridge like this instead of as it was on a normal work shift, Stadi sighed deeply. She would have traded extra years of journey for an atmosphere like this during her day job.

“Signal from the anomaly is starting to fluctuate,” Kim reported, reading his console with a casual competency. “Looks like whatever it is may be destabilizing, we’d better get there quickly or there may be nothing left but an echo.”

“Recommendation, Mr Paris?” Stadi asked, knowing what he was going to say because, well, who wouldn’t, if they really loved to fly. He didn’t disappoint.

“We can cut nearly two hours off our time if we go straight through the asteroid belt at its densest point and then slingshot off the second gas giant at close range,” he told her, swinging round very briefly to address her directly, clearly having some difficulty keeping a big grin off his face.

“Well, you’d better get on with it then,” she told him, doing a much better job of maintaining a cool, detached professionalism. She couldn’t help but smile when she heard Kim groan quietly.

“Yes Ma’am,” Paris said gleefully, and sent the ship hurtling towards the whirling maelstrom of big rocks which lurked only a few second’s impulse travel away. Stadi settled in for the ride, part of her wishing she was at the con, but most of her recognizing that she wouldn’t dare to take such a big ship into that obstacle course. 

As the asteroids approached in the viewscreen, the comm badge on her and Kim’s uniforms both burst into life, and the demanding voice of Lt Commander Cavit filled the room. "Senior officers to the bridge!"

"Damn!" exclaimed Kim, relying on the intelligence of the ship’s communication protocols not to route his outburst back to the bridge.

"Computer, freeze program," commanded Stadi, and the lifelike simulation of the Voyager bridge immediately halted into static immobility. Paris sighed and twisted round on the now immovable Conn chair. "Just as it was getting interesting."

A second message filtered through B'Elanna's comm badge; "Torres report to Engineering immediately!" She got up, waiting for the others to join her.

Stadi got up from her chair and walked down to where Paris was sitting, placed a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," she said.

"It's not your fault," he sighed.

"We've still got half an hour's booked time; I'll leave it running."

Paris watched the three of them leave the holodeck at a trot, and turned back to the console. He sighed. Stadi had left the holoprogram running, but had forgotten to unfreeze it.

"Computer, resume simulation."

Nothing happened, and he sighed again. If only Stadi had remembered that he had no computer authority in the holodeck. He should have reminded her, but then she probably didn't have the power to order the computer to obey him. Getting up from the helm, he slouched his way to the portside turbolift door, which also doubled as the way out, and stabbed at the release controls, rather over-optimistically, as he knew before he tried it what would happen. Nothing.

He was stuck in here, with nothing to do but stare at frozen readouts and static displays, until someone remembered he was here and came to let him out.

This was intolerable.

Four months of living like this had taught him to tolerate it. The alternative held a little too much finality for his liking.

Whatever the senior officers had been called away to deal with, it did not seem to have affected the normal flow of the rest of shipboard life. Twenty-five minutes later Paris was interrupted from the contemplative trance he'd fallen into by two Starfleet crew members whose names he couldn't remember entering the holodeck for their own booked time. The Voyager bridge simulation dissolved into a simple games arena as he stood up warily and turned to face the door. 

The two - both men in their late twenties or early thirties and well built, athletic types, had been talking as they walked in, and both stopped when they saw Paris and stared at him.

"What are you doing in here?" one of them demanded. His attitude was more of scorn than of challenge, and a few months ago it would have made Paris bristle. But he'd learned to tighten up on his impulse control since being sentenced to prison, and even more since he'd been living in this particular prison, and he knew that taking an aggressive stance would only make matters worse. It was not in his nature to be submissive, so he faced them squarely, but his voice was quiet and contained no anger when he replied simply, "Lt Stadi was called to the bridge unexpectedly." He had also learned that name dropping the Chief Conn Officer could diffuse angry situations before they started, especially with Starfleet crew, as she was held in some respect by most of them. 

It seemed to work, as the two men accepted his explanation and simply indicated that he should bug the hell off and not clutter up their quality time. He moved towards the now open door, intending to return to his quarters as quickly as possible, as there were not enough people around at this time of night in the corridors between here and his room on deck 4. Even if everyone on board actively disliked him, there was some safety in numbers. 

Just as he reached the exit, one of the two men, a burly, dark complexioned human he thought he'd seen working in Ship's Services, called out, "Hey, Paris!"

He turned, wondering whether to interpret the man's tone of voice as challenging or a friendly overture, and waited for him to continue.

"Ensign Kim says you're an expert on the twentieth century, can you play squash?"

Paris thought it wise not to mention that he'd been on a championship team at the Academy, "I've played some."

"You wanna stay and have a game?"

Paris didn't quite know how to respond. These days his first instinct was to look for an ulterior motive, but the man's face, while not openly friendly, was not blazing with hatred either. It was hard for Tom to believe that someone might be making an offer of temporary companionship for its own sake and not with any strings attached. On the plus side, he was pretty sure this man was on Kim's staff, and Kim was one of the few actual friends he had on board. On the minus side, there were two of them and they both looked strong… but if they'd had anything violent in mind, they'd probably have tried it by now. His gaze shifted from the first man to his companion, paler, shorter and stockier, and the question must have been obvious on his face; why me when there are already two of you?

"Yolen here did his ankle in this morning, he won't last ten minutes at this, and I need a decent workout."

Paris took a tentative step forward, assessing the slightly awkward way that the man now identified as Crewman Yolen (he thought, from Security) was standing, favouring one leg over the other. He was about to ask Yolen why he hadn't been to the doctor to deal with it but suppressed the question. It was pretty obvious; he wasn't the only person on board who despised the sanctimonious Dr Fitzgerald and avoided him whenever possible. However, he did have some emergency medical training of his own.

"If you could get access to a regenerator, I could probably deal with that for you," he suggested.

"Fitzgerald's got the Sickbay supplies sewn up tight," Yolen growled, his eyes lighting up with something that looked very close to hatred on thinking about the doctor. "Hell, it's just a sprain, Galland's right though, I won't last ten minutes." 

Paris risked another step back into the room, feeling the slight prickling of fear in case he had misinterpreted these two and they wanted something more from him than just a game of Squash. But neither of them made a violent move towards him. Yolen chucked the Squash racquet he was holding at Paris, who caught it without thinking. "You take the edge off him for me and I'll beat him later," he suggested. Paris found himself smiling at the invitation.

He was rusty, and his reflexes were slower than usual, his body stiff and beset with too many aches and pains to be as supple as Squash demanded, but he found he could hold his own against Galland, who was not a competition level player. He considered throwing the game so as not to antagonise his newly discovered acquaintance, but he calculated that he would earn no respect from either of his new companions if he did so. So he put enough effort into his game to stay ahead of Galland on points, and, once he got into his game a little, started to bounce the other man all over the court. It was fun, and Galland didn't seem to mind being challenged. By the time Paris won the game, both men had unbent enough towards him to be quite friendly.

Resting against the wall, panting from his recent exertions, Galland spent some of his precious breath in laughter. "I guess Kim was right after all, you're not so bad, Paris. I'd hate to play you without that bracelet round your ankle - it must be slowing you down." 

Paris had become accustomed to wearing the security ankle locator which Cavit had reinstated the day they'd arrived in the Delta Quadrant, but there wasn't a day went by that it didn't impede him in some way, by catching or chafing or just drawing attention to his status as despised convict. His reaction to the reminder must have shown clearly on his face, as Galland actually apologised. "Sorry, that must be a sore point."

"Yeah," agreed Yolen, "that bastard Cavit'd have them on all the Maquis and half of us if he thought he could get away with it."

"And I thought it was only me he hated," Paris commented.

"You, he hates. The rest of us he just despises. I'm lucky Tuvok's my department head. He's cold but he's fair."

"Kim's too green to run interference all the time, but he's a good kid otherwise," Galland joined in the assessment. He tossed his racquet over to Yolen, "It's your turn, he's run me into the ground."

Tired now, Paris was quite happy to play a much slower, gentler game with the injured man, who lasted, contrary to expectations, for nearly twenty minutes, although Paris made sure he didn't have to run about too much. By that time, Paris felt confident enough to suggest that he bind up Yolen's ankle the old fashioned way. The other man was clearly in some pain and grateful for the offer. The two men shared quarters on deck five, (some doubling up had been necessary to accommodate the Maquis crew) and Paris felt reasonably confident in going with them to find something suitable for use as a bandage. 

Besides which, deck five was halfway to deck four. A protective escort was always welcome these days.

He had brief second thoughts as he paused at the open door to their quarters, before following them in with a mental shrug. Galland was already searching around for a makeshift bandage and unearthed a small pile of as-yet-not recycled uniform jackets stuffed in the corner by the sofa. It appeared as though the two of them were a pretty good match for each other in terms of domestic habits – they had definitely shaken off any early training that tended to keep Starfleet personnel, particularly officers, organised and tidy for the rest of their lives. Yolen and Galland were both crewmen rather than officers, hence the need to double up on living accommodations. Rank had its privileges. If Paris hadn’t been an ‘observer’ when joining the ship and thus billeted in single quarters, he would probably have ended up sharing too, although he felt that Cavit probably would not have wanted him to get the opportunity to win over anyone else by close quarters contact – he seemed annoyed enough that Kim, and later Stadi, had disregarded warnings and made up their own minds.

“Will this do?” Galland held up a grey undertunic that should probably have gone into the recycler days ago.

“I think I can work with that,” Paris took the garment and assessed it for elasticity. It would make a nearly perfect compression bandage – but they weren’t easy to tear. “I’ll need something to cut it with.”

There was perhaps the slightest hesitation, as well as a quick glance between the two crewmen before Yolen shrugged, and pulled a knife out of a nearby drawer, handing it over to Paris. He took it, speculating why a crewman on Voyager would feel the need to keep what was clearly a sharp weapon secreted in his quarters and how long he might have had it. It was a good-looking instrument, carved and inlaid handle and a well-tended blade. Paris chose to assume that it was a personal memento rather than something deliberately stashed away against the chance that violence broke out on board and Yolen needed to either defend himself – or choose sides. Not that that wasn’t a distinct possibility. 

Cutting a long, wide strip out of the jacket, as long a contiguous piece as he could manage, with a little difficulty and a careful spiral cut around the body, he gave the knife back (not without a small pang of regret because it was a decent weapon and he wished he had one) and indicated that Yolen should seat himself on the lounger and raise his leg by putting the foot on the nearby coffee table.

Neither man spoke as Paris, recalling from some years back the muscle-memory he had acquired in his basic field medicine course, made a decent job of supporting the ankle to a sufficient extent that healing would be facilitated, and tied the bandage off higher up the leg so that Yolen could still get into his regulation boot and hide the whole thing under his pants leg.

“There, I think that’ll do it.”

There was a slightly awkward silence, as if no one really knew what to say or do next, then Galland asked,

“Have you eaten recently?”

Paris didn’t want to admit that the last time he’d had a decent meal was two days ago when Stadi had shared some saved-up replicator rations with him. He was embarrassed to think that people knew he was going hungry because that would have suggested that either Kim or Torres would have been blabbing about him to their colleagues, but he didn’t think either of them would have done that. Maybe he just looked half-starved, or maybe it was just a topic on everybody’s mind.

“Uh, well, not really today,” he said, meaning ‘today’ to be pretty much the whole of the previous 24 hours given that it was nearly morning now.

“I’ve got a replicator ration you can have,” Galland said awkwardly, not meeting his eyes. “Seems like fair payment to me.” Paris, more than a little surprised at the generosity, looked between the other two men for a moment, and saw what he hadn’t previously picked up on. He relaxed a little. So that was the way the wind blew. That would certainly go some way towards explaining why Galland was prepared to sacrifice a precious resource to pay for a kindness specifically directed at Yolen. 

Paris accepted gratefully, chose a thick soup which was as calorifically high in a single ration as possible, and practically inhaled it out of the mug it came in, watched by the other two who were both looking at him as though they’d solved a mystery, or perhaps come to a different opinion than the one they’d had when they’d first walked into the holodeck that morning.

“I guess the rumours were right,” Yolen said quietly to Galland, but not quietly enough that Paris didn’t hear them. He was about to open his mouth to ask them what rumours and where they came from, when his combadge blared.

"Cavit to Paris."

Paris groaned and rolled his eyes. "What do you want?" He could have been politer but knew by now it made no difference at all.

"I want you to report to Deck thirteen for your work shift."

He frowned, "It isn't my work shift."

"You work when I tell you to work, you little maggot. I want you down here in five minutes, or I'll send a security team to fetch you."

Paris suppressed any further rebellion with an expertise borne of long practice. "Understood."

Cavit signed off. Paris glanced over to where Yolen and Galland had been listening to the entire exchange and went back to finishing off the soup.

"Geeze, he's really got it in for you," Galland commented.

Paris shrugged, "Maybe he had a run in with The Admiral sometime back at HQ. That kind of thing tends to make an impression." By 'The Admiral' he of course meant his father; even he thought of his father as 'The Admiral'. Both Yolen and Galland obviously knew that Tom Paris was the scion of a line of Starfleet Brass; both seemed to know what he meant.

Paris got up. "I'd better not keep him waiting. Thanks for the food."

"Thanks for the bandage." Yolen waved his leg, foot immobilised, in Paris' general direction. "Feels pretty good."

"Guess I had to have learned something in those emergency medic classes."

"Hey, Paris…" Galland stopped him at the door.

"Yes?"

"We have the holodeck in three days if you’d like to play squash again?"

Paris couldn't help but smile, "I'd like that."

Maybe he’d just made a couple more friends.

Leaving the turbo-lift on Deck Thirteen he found Cavit waiting impatiently at the hatch to a Jeffries tube, a large container of parts parked at his feet. Paris recognised them at once; optronic fibre linkages; there were thousands of the fiddly little bastards throughout the ship, but by far the worst ones were those buried in the conduits accessed by the major Engineering Jeffries tubes. Whoever had designed the positioning of them was either a sadist or had the arm length of an Orang-utan. Difficult to see, tough to pull out and horrible to fit back in, they still had to be regularly replaced, usually by some poor technician at a construction yard during an overhaul. Voyager’s shouldn’t be due for replacement yet, but these tubes had taken heavy damage several times during battles with the Kazon, and there was cabling and various assemblies dangling loose and bulging out all over the place, not to mention that most of the emergency lighting had gone too. It would have been more sensible to replace that first, but Paris didn’t rate either Cavit or the Chief Engineer with a huge amount of it, so he knew there was no point making that suggestion.

Actually, he didn’t mind Jeffries Tubes jobs too much, as there wasn’t that much room in there, and absolutely nowhere for people to lurk unseen. The work was dirty, backbreaking and hard on the knees, but he could pretty much guarantee he’d be left alone to do it.

“The whole Jeffries tube, by second shift,” Cavit told him . If he was expecting protest or an argument, Paris wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. He wasn’t going to give him a ‘sir’ either.

“Right,” he acknowledged, unfastening the door to the tube and taking the bag from Cavit.

“Sir,” prompted Cavit, predictably. 

Tom snorted, “Civilian. Bite me.” He started to crawl in, to be halted by Cavit’s arm and a furious expression. He may not have been aware exactly what the 20th Century term meant, but he knew it was an insult. 

“I can make it brig time, if you prefer not to be respectful.”

“Suits me,” Paris responded, staring the older man down. “There are security cameras there that can’t be turned off. I’m happy with that. Are you?”

He knew he’d pay for it later, but right now his stomach was full, he’d made new friends and he could feel the righteous indignation at the forefront of his mind. No, Cavit preferred to operate without the possibility of witnesses. His hand fell away and Paris continued into the tube, not even bothering to look behind. He heard the door slam, but that didn’t bother him. Jeffries tubes were designed to be secure from the outside, but always guarantee escape from the inside. He knew Cavit would have loved to have locked him in, but Voyager’s design made that impossible. It was the little victories.

He fell into a rhythm almost immediately. Fortunately, he did have long arms, and excellent low-light eyesight, and fingers sensitive enough to be able to trace linkages through the conduits without having to see what he was doing. Locate, remove, replace. Locate, remove, replace. Sometimes there were whole metres of space where there were no linkages, sometimes he had to gingerly squirm under or around damaged components protruding from the walls or dangling from the ceiling. 

He had lost track of time, and how far he had gone down the tube, when he came to a section which was so damaged that the outer wall of the tube itself had been torn apart, and he could see the light shining through from the other side. Peering through, curious to know where he was, he could see one of the subsidiary engine control rooms situated off the main engineering section, and realised he’d come a lot further than he’d thought. He’d completed about two thirds of the whole tube. Pleased with himself, he sat back for a short rest.

“No, I don’t think we can trust her.” 

It was quite faint, so that he could barely make out the words, but he knew the voice. When he’d been in Chakotay’s Maquis cell, piloting the Val Jean for him, he’d heard it a lot. Seska.

Peering out cautiously, careful not to make any noise or sudden moves, he could see that the door to the room was closed and inside Seska was holding court with at least three of the Maquis.

“We’re going to need her,” another of the voices said, again, in a low voice so (presumably) their conversation did not come to the attention of anyone out in Engineering. “Anyway, she’s your friend, you should talk to her.”

“We have enough,” Seska objected. “Once we’ve cleared out the dead wood, the others will know we mean business. It will be much harder for them to say no at that point.”

“We’ll need at least a third of them.”

“Nearer half, but not long term. There are other options.”

Paris edged back out of the conduit, quiet as a mouse, his spine prickling with apprehension. If they knew he had heard them his throat would be slit from ear to ear before the end of the shift. Crawling back to the Jefferies Tube entrance, which was well away from where the conspirators had been talking, he stepped out of it and, every sense straining, made his way to the turbo lift. He had to get off this deck. Praying that Cavit (having set him a task expected to last five or six hours) would not think to check up on him after only two hours, he called for deck four and scuttled back to his quarters to hole up and think. By the time he’d got there he knew what his only sensible course of action was; he had to let someone know, but there were so few people he could trust.

He tapped his comm badge with a sense of inevitability. "Paris to the Captain."

Nothing happened, except that his comm badge reported, dispassionately, "Tom Paris is not cleared for direct communication to command staff." Nothing had changed there then. He hadn’t really expected it to.

He cursed to himself and wondered if he should go through Kim, who had the Captain's ear. But he didn't want to get the young ensign into trouble if it turned out he was just being paranoid. He reviewed again what he’d just heard and tried to fit the words and tone into any other interpretation, but nothing fitted as well as the conclusion he’d initially jumped to, the conclusion that anyone with a brain would come to.

He didn't like any of the senior Starfleet officers (Stadi and Kim excepted), the ones he'd had dealings with hadn't exactly endeared him to them over the last few months, but he cared about Harry, and besides that he knew that he, Tom Paris, supposed Maquis traitor, would be a hell of a lot worse off under a regime run by Seska. As in dead. Slowly, and painfully. He could talk to B’elanna, but she was friendly with Seska, and he knew she was almost as frustrated by life here as he was – he didn’t want to push their tentative friendship too much. If she decided to side with Seska that would just put him one step closer to the knife.

He'd always thought Seska a bit creepy, even back in his brief Maquis days, when she'd been sucking up to Chakotay, and sharing his bed, no doubt filling his ears with flattery. She was the sort of vicious, manipulative bitch who should have been bred out of the species (any species) centuries ago, but it seemed there would always be women like her who would use sex and flattery and cunning to get whatever they wanted by allying themselves with the most powerful man of the moment. Sure, he'd used sex in the past, to obtain a warm place to sleep for the night, and food in his belly. He had, once or twice, used it to get himself a job when all else had failed. But he'd always been up front about it; everybody involved had known the deal.

He knew he couldn't risk taking what he'd heard to Cavit. It had to be Janeway herself, if he could get her to listen to him. She’d had very few dealings with the crew over the past few months, isolating herself more and more and spending what time she had down with her Chief Engineer, who might have been a competent officer back in the Alpha Quadrant, where a starbase was always a tow from a salvage tug away. Out here his improvisational skills had proven utterly woeful and he was incapable of finding new ways to recrystallize dilithium or hold failing systems together. Janeway spent a large part of every day in Engineering, according to B’elanna, who had lots of ideas but whom absolutely nobody would listen to because she was not an academy graduate – as if that could possibly matter out here. It certainly wouldn’t stop Seska, if she got control of the ship. Any other time Janeway had available appeared to be taken up with assisting Tuvok in keeping control, trying to plot ways around Kazon hot spots and trying to solve a hundred and one other problems. She hadn’t been seen anywhere else all that much and Stadi, reluctant to speak out of turn about her senior officer but worried enough to need someone to talk to, had confided in Paris that she thought the Captain might have fallen into a depression brought on by misplaced guilt (as she’d certainly done nothing to strand them here) and Stadi was worried that she’d refused to go and seek help from Dr Fitzgerald – a position which Paris entirely sympathised with. 

He had to find a way to get to Janeway personally. Well, she had to eat, just like everyone else, and he remembered that Kim had mentioned seeing her in the Officer's Mess every now and then. Even if she just ate in the Captain’s dining room, that was just next door to the Mess, so if he judged it right, maybe he could catch her going in or coming out…

He was in luck. After only seven minutes of waiting; lurking just round the corner, he saw Captain Janeway step off the turbolift heading for the officer's mess. He propelled himself out of hiding and then checked when he saw Cavit and Tuvok following her. Damn! But she'd already seen him and he was committed to this course of action now.

"Captain, I need to talk to you," he told her. Cavit immediately stepped in to run interference. "Anything you have to say to the Captain can go through me, Captain Janeway doesn't have to listen to you." 

Paris glanced across at the Captain, who was moving on into the mess, ignoring him, leaving him to Cavit. He knew it was time for desperate measures before she was out of earshot. 

"Yeah, and you'll never pass it on, like you never tell her anything! Did you know that, Captain? That your first officer doesn't…. ooof!" he was cut off by being twisted round and slammed violently against the wall. Cavit had his arm twisted behind his back and was putting just a little too much pressure on the wrist. He could feel the tendons straining and wondered if anything would actually snap. He couldn't suppress a small cry of pain. The world started to darken around him, and Tuvok's voice seemed to come from a greater distance than his physical location actually warranted.

"I believe that is sufficient, Commander."

"I'll be the judge of that, Lieutenant. This young animal's stepped over the line just once too often."

"That is enough, Cavit!" the Captain had changed her mind and paused at the door, and now she was walking back towards the altercation. Paris felt the pressure on his arm and against the wall lessen and he sagged slightly, trying to get back the breath that had been knocked out of him.

Normally, Janeway would have walked on and let her two officers handle the situation, but something had caught her eye and made her take a second look. Yes, she had been right. There was a silver anklet on Paris’ right leg. She felt a stab of annoyance; she had made a promise and that promise bound her and her subordinates. 

If she hadn't paused, she would already have been inside the officer's mess and Paris would have been out of sight by the time his face hit the wall. As it was, she saw Cavit's reaction, and felt a prickling of unease at the relish with which he was applying force. She had heard Cavit's remark to Tuvok and wondered what Tom Paris had been doing to annoy her First Officer. Thinking back, she realised that she hadn't heard much about Paris since they'd got here, had almost forgotten he was still on board, but they'd all been so preoccupied with their predicament there hadn't been any time to think about just one person's situation. She had simply trusted that it would be dealt with without troubling her. Now she wondered just how it had been dealt with.

She walked up to Paris, still being held by Cavit, but with less force, and tapped Cavit on the shoulder to make him let go. Her first officer stepped back, reluctantly, and remained a pace behind his captain, glaring at the younger man.

Now that he had her attention, Paris’ demeanour changed, he kept his mouth shut and stood waiting for her to question him in her own time. She assessed his dishevelled appearance, raking a disapproving look up and down his crumpled and ripped coveralls, and then remained fixed on his feet.

"Mr Cavit, why is this man wearing an ankle locator?" 

"The circumstances have changed, Captain. Had we been at home, he would have left the ship long ago. I considered him a danger to the ship, if only for the negative feelings he stirs up. It was my judgement that we needed to be able to keep more of an eye on him."

"A comm badge will locate anyone on board." Janeway kept her voice mild, but she was quite aware that Cavit couldn't tell that she was becoming increasingly annoyed with him. It had been bubbling under for a while now because he had not been the help she expected since they got here. It was yet another thing to doubt herself over – her ability to choose senior staff. Cavit had worked with her for years, in different capacities. She had been happy to offer him the place of First Officer, but she had started regretting it almost immediately – it did rather appear as though he had been promoted past his level of competence.

"But it can be removed, Captain.” Cavit responded, “Someone bent on mischief…"

"Remove it. Now." Her voice was flat but imperative. Tuvok, as security officer, stepped in and applied his own authorisation to release the anklet. He picked it up and put it out of sight somewhere in his uniform. 

Paris sighed, wiggling his ankle slightly with a look of relief. "Thank you."

"I keep my promises, Mr Paris. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?"

Now, Paris had to negotiate the difficult task of getting her to believe his story, preferably without the company of Cavit. It was pretty much the first time he’d exchanged words with her since they’d been stranded in the Delta Quadrant, and she looked very different from the confident woman who had come to extract him from the penal colony. She looked older and lacking that bright spark which had attracted his attention from the moment he first saw her. 

"Captain, I'd prefer not to discuss this in the corridor. Or in public."

She held his gaze searchingly. He tried to put all the sincerity and honesty in his return stare that he could, and she seemed to accept it. She looked tired, and there was a vulnerability in her eyes that it surprised him to see.

"Very well, we'll go to my ready room." She moved towards the turbo lift and all three men moved to follow her, but she put out a hand to stop Cavit. "You go on and eat, I'll deal with this."

"Captain…" Cavit sounded doubtful and Paris couldn't believe the man was so stupid as to keep pushing his prejudices in the captain's face.

"I said I'd handle it," she snapped, causing him to look startled. Paris thought he'd finally got the message and allowed himself to smirk slightly at the obnoxious man as he retreated.

Tuvok remained by the captain's side, watching her, prepared to go or stay as soon as she was specific about which she wanted him to do. As she walked back towards the turbolift, she looked over to him and motioned him to follow. He waited for Paris to go first and followed closely behind. The message was clear - from Tuvok at least. Paris figured the Vulcan had been hanging around too much with Cavit and Fitzgerald - he'd actually bought into the 'danger to society' routine that the two of them had been peddling about him. Tuvok didn't push him or jab him in the ribs or crowd him though - in his position Cavit would have done all three by now.

None of that mattered right now. Now he had a shot. He had to make sure he didn't blow it.


	2. Chapter 2

Janeway led the way into her Ready room after a journey conducted in tense and uncomfortable silence and sat down at her desk. Having not been invited to sit himself, Paris assumed a formal stance in front of her. She looked up at him and could not have seen greater proof that here was an Academy graduate. His at-ease posture was utterly precise, so perfect he could have been used as a teaching example for the Starfleet manual. It reminded her that the young man standing in front of her was not just a ragged low life, but the product - an honours graduate in fact - of the most demanding training institution anywhere in the Federation. She wondered if he was trying to impress her.

"Now, Mr Paris, what did you have to say to me?" she asked, keeping her voice casually authoritarian.

"Captain, this morning, I was replacing the optronic pathway fibre linkages in Jefferies Tube 57 when I heard people talking," his voice was crisp and business-like, just as if he were a senior officer handing over Bridge command at the end of a shift. Both his voice and his stance warred with the rest of his image; crumpled, scruffy overalls smeared with dirt and frayed at the edges, his hair in disarray and his hands and face less than pristine. His attire spoke volumes about the kind of work he did on board. She conjured up a mental picture of JT57. It was a minor linking conduit connecting the two main Engineering Jefferies tubes. Seldom accessed except for the kind of maintenance he described, it ran directly overhead to the upper deck of engineering and carried on through to the stern of the ship through some of the most dangerous of the warp core energy flow control areas. 

While she was picturing, Paris continued. "Seska was with a couple of the other Maquis crew, just behind the plasma manifold couplings. I wouldn't have heard them if there hadn’t been a panel blown out in the tube, just above them. I wasn't logged in with engineering in that section, so they didn't know I was there."

"Just out of interest, why weren't you logged in?" She knew it sounded like a challenge, which it was, but he didn’t bristle or become flippant the way she’d expected him to. 

"I had been ordered to replace all the fibre links in the entire tube. I'd started at the stern end and was working my way forward. It's kind of tedious work, Captain, and I'd gotten into a pattern, hadn't realised how far I'd got. It was only when I heard voices that I realised I'd worked my way clean over the warp core assembly."

He paused for her reaction. It was a reasonable explanation. She'd put in enough time in Jefferies Tube maintenance over the years to know how mind numbing the experience could be. She could tell that he was waiting for her to ask the other question that had occurred to her but she decided not to. The way he was telling it, it was obvious he'd been alone (against the regulation that people should work in pairs in that area), but it was also obvious, reading between the lines, that he hadn't been the one flouting that regulation. She nodded for him to continue.

"Mostly I don’t pay much attention to people talking. People never notice the guy in overalls scrubbing the deck, so they talk in front of you without even thinking about it. About their boyfriends, or some practical joke they’re playing on a crewmate, I’ve heard it all, we’re invisible, non-people, but this was different. They had obviously taken care not to be overheard by anybody." He realised he was drifting off topic and with some obvious effort, pulled himself back to the subject, and told her what he'd heard, word for word.

When he'd finished, she sat back and assessed him even more carefully. She realised he was brighter than she'd given him credit for. Possibly quite a bit brighter.

"And you thought that this was of enough significance to bother me personally."

His brows knotted very slightly, perhaps perplexed that she might not be able to see the significance. "Yes, Captain."

"Well, Mr Paris, I agree with you. Just out of interest, why not tell Cavit?"

The young man snorted with disdain. "Cavit couldn't find his butt with both hands."

If nothing else, it proved that the spirit hadn't been knocked out of Admiral Paris' wild child completely. She had mixed feelings about the way he'd put it but tended to agree with him that Cavit probably would have been too busy denigrating the messenger to see behind his dislike and recognise the significance of the message.

"Mr Paris. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. You may be sure that I will act on it. Dismissed."

To his credit he didn't hesitate or insist on being involved. He nodded and walked out of the room without a backward glance.

Once he had gone, Janeway stood up and paced the room in thought for some time. His revelation had opened up a disturbing situation, one which she would have to deal with quickly. In a way, she wasn't surprised that something like this had happened, what disturbed her the most was her memory of Cavit's behaviour outside the Officer's mess. The situation was tense enough without her second in command behaving like a Cardassian Gul. She wondered if Tom Paris had been the only recipient of such behaviour over the past few months and was even more disturbed by the realisation that she simply didn't know. She had to get to know the crew better - she kept telling herself this as they lurched from crisis to crisis, but there never seemed to be enough time.

The surviving Maquis had not adapted to life particularly well under Starfleet rules. Not for the first time she regretted that their leader, Chakotay, hadn't survived that fall down the Ocampa stairwell when the platform collapsed under him. He had been a Starfleet officer for years before resigning to join the Maquis, and even on brief acquaintance she knew he was someone she could have worked with, someone who could lead and control his Maquis rebels. Without him, they had not exactly been co-operative, any of them. But there had been nothing she could do about that - she had been helping Tuvok at the time and there had been no one to go back for the other man. They were lucky to have located Kim and the young Maquis woman, B'Elanna Torres. She should have overruled Cavit and allowed Paris to beam back down with them. He'd acquitted himself well enough on the array, but at the time she had been too preoccupied with worry over young Kim to ask herself whether Cavit's reaction to Paris had been entirely balanced. His behaviour was making it pretty clear that, at least where Paris was concerned, he had a major chip on his shoulder.

With their leader gone, the Maquis had been less than receptive to joining forces with the Starfleet ship. The resultant fight with the Kazon had resulted in the deaths of nearly a third of them before their ship had been destroyed and the other 30 were forced to take refuge on the bigger ship. Voyager had retreated before she was too badly damaged and Janeway hadn't been able to change the Caretaker's mind about sending them home before he destroyed the array. So there they were, trapped a lifetime away from home, away from loved ones, away from support of any kind. She had spent hours lying awake at night trying to work out what she could have done differently. 

They were overcrowded and although their new friends Neelix and Kes had asked to stay on board, she had been unable to fit them in. The two ships had flown together for several weeks while Voyager was repaired and brought up to speed. Then they had parted company. She missed them both. Before he left, Neelix had given her some suggestions on which planets to aim for where she might obtain assistance, but before long, they'd had to deviate from the planned route as the Kazon harried them and drove them, again and again, away from the straight course home. She knew the ship wasn't in a fit state to take them on in battle; so far she'd managed to avoid another serious fight, although there had been some minor skirmishes which had contributed to their current state of dilapidation.

So they had been stranded, their ship seriously damaged, with thirty unwilling Maquis members on board and one convict who was despised by the Starfleet crew and hated by the Maquis. She had hardly seen Paris since, and hadn't thought that odd - hadn't actually thought about it at all until now. When Cavit had ordered him to be confined to quarters when he wasn't working, ostensibly for his own protection, she had agreed with that, at least on a temporary basis, and had not followed up on it. There had been far too much else to occupy her thoughts. Had it really been four months since they had been pulled here? She had an inexperienced Ops officer wet out of the Academy, a First Officer who was undoubtedly just as much out of his depth in the current situation as the green Ensign was, a chief engineer who couldn't seem to get the warp engines working past Warp 6, a doctor who had managed to alienate literally everybody on board, including herself, and a state of near war existing between the two crew factions, which took all of Tuvok's energies to control. At this rate, they were not going to survive for a year, let alone the decades (or at Warp 6, lifetimes) it would take to get them home.

She remembered that she wasn't alone in the room. Tuvok had been standing quietly by the door, letting her think things through. He'd heard everything Paris had to say, and no doubt had come to conclusions of his own.

"Well?" She asked him.

"It is not unlikely," he admitted, stepping closer to the desk and stopping where Paris had been standing a minute or so before.

"Seska's attitude should have warned me months ago," she confessed. "There's been something not quite right about her since the beginning."

"She has an unfortunate tendency towards violent behaviour, as do most of the Maquis." Tuvok observed, a note of disapproval very obvious in his voice.

"I can't just dump the woman in the brig and arrest anyone who's been talking with her."

"No. And no doubt the majority of the crew will not consider Mr Paris a reliable witness."

"Especially the Maquis. Pity Seska seems to have such a hold over them."

"It was my understanding that she was intimate with Captain Chakotay. That, no doubt, has given her a kind of status since his death. Her ambition would have done the rest. I do not find it at all surprising that she might want this ship for herself, or that she might believe herself capable of taking it."

"Suggestions?"

"We must neutralise her."

"Not just her, but her influence over the rest of the Maquis. We'll need proof to make any charges against her seem reasonable."

"I will arrange continual surveillance."

"Be subtle, Tuvok. My instinct tells me that Seska is a danger."

Tuvok nodded but paused on his way out.

"Captain, there may be some value in retaining Mr Paris' involvement, if you feel you can trust him sufficiently. As he said, no one pays attention to the crewman performing menial tasks. Perhaps he could be strategically deployed…"

She shook her head. "I'm not sure I can trust him, Tuvok. Thomas Paris would have known that Seska in charge of this ship would have spelt almost certain death for him. He may have acted purely out of self-preservation, not out of any loyalty to Starfleet. His service record says he has no loyalty to anyone but himself. I would prefer not to put my trust in someone like that. Besides, I can’t betray him to them, it would be all too easy for them to clear him out of the way."

Tuvok nodded again and left her alone.

Janeway sat in thought for a long time, staring out of the window at the warp trails slipping by and attempting to suppress what threatened to turn into a sense of panic if she let it go further. She hadn’t felt that level of anxiety for years, not in fact since she’d been recovering from her stay in captivity courtesy of the Cardassians. The doctors in charge of her care had called it a post traumatic stress, and reassured her that with help, she would leave it behind, and she had. 

There was no help here. No one besides Tuvok to confide in. No end in sight, except perhaps for the one likely to be offered by Seska if she and her Maquis gained control of the ship. Voyager had never been designed to act as a prison camp – with 30 on board, how easy it would be for them to get into the weapons lockers and stage a mutiny, especially as time went on and they became more and more familiar with the systems and procedures of the ship. 

She wondered if she would have to leave some or all of them behind somewhere in order to be free of the constant danger they represented. It went against everything she’d been trained to believe, but surely her duty to her own crew had to take precedence?

She thought back to Paris and experienced a pang of guilt. She should have checked up on him to see how he was getting on rather than trust that Cavit would find work for him on board. Alone in JT57, hours of fibre-linkage replacement. Something didn’t smell right here.

She called up Tom Paris’ duty assignments for the last few days on her terminal and was immediately taken aback by the number of hours he was listed as on work shift. She knew everyone had to put in extra time in their current situation, but those hours left little time for sleep, never mind anything else. Still, while he was on work shift at least he would be in the company of and supervised by others. It was possible that he volunteered for the work in order to keep the time he spent in his quarters to a minimum. She remembered that when she had reviewed his record at the penal colony before going to talk to him there, it had shown a similar pattern. His willingness to work hard had garnered him good reports from his custodians – it was one of the reasons she had eventually felt justified in raising the possibility to Admiral Patterson of taking him with her to the Badlands.

Four months, and she couldn’t remember seeing Paris around the ship even once. That seemed odd, given that most of his assignments seemed to be with the Engineering section and she spent the better part of every day in Engineering. Surely they would at least have seen each other in passing, so why did it seem almost as though someone was going out of their way to prevent Paris from crossing paths with her at all?

Exhausted, as she was at the end of every day, she eventually dragged herself down to her quarters to sleep, but before she did, she made a resolution that she would actually take the time to talk with him tomorrow, and find out what had really been going on.

Afraid that rumours of his report to the Captain might have got back to the Maquis, and equally worried that Cavit might find him some spontaneous task which took him far too close to them, Paris went straight to the Cargo Bay where he knew Freddy Bristow (a fairly decent Starfleet ensign) was on duty and volunteered to help him. Bristow was also tall and built like a shuttlecraft, so he was pretty confident no one would get funny with him in the ensign’s presence, and so it proved – he had a quiet and reasonably pleasant afternoon helping to clean up and re-categorise supplies after the mess created by their last battle. Bristow and his three Starfleet crewmen welcomed the extra help, and between them they made excellent progress. The area almost looked normal by the time they went off shift that evening. Bristow and his small team headed up to the mess hall to eat an evening meal, but Paris, despite being invited, decided to return to his room instead. It was a time of day when either Cavit or Fitzgerald were likely to be in the mess hall, and he didn’t want to be run out in front of the other crewmembers.

He realised he’d made a serious mistake the second he stepped inside his little cabin on Deck 4. He wasn‘t alone. They were Cavit's 'enforcers', three particularly unwholesome specimens of humanity wearing uniforms they didn't deserve. They weren't the only ones whose main hobby seemed to be trying to make his life a misery, but they were three of the most brutal, and the biggest of them had good cause to remember him with zero fondness, since Paris had managed to break his nose once. Someone had given them the entry code to his door, and it didn't take a genius to figure out who, or why. It was an alarming development - if they could get into his own quarters, they could do what they liked to him, and take their time doing it. It was the one line that Cavit hadn’t crossed yet; anger was making him stupid. While that occurred to Paris as he was mentally summing up his options, it didn’t help his immediate dilemma. Having had several previous encounters with Paris, and on several occasions come off worst despite superiority in numbers, this time they were better prepared and gave him no opportunity to fight back; before he had fully realised what was happening, the one lurking by the door had seized his arms and kicked his feet out from under, and he was pinned on his knees, arms twisted behind him with two of them holding him in position while the third came to stand directly in front of him. He was a stocky, ugly bloke of the sort Paris had frequently encountered outside of Starfleet, in bars around the quadrant and occasionally in prison; always running in a pack because they were too inadequate to control any situation without lackeys. With lackeys however, they gained enough confidence to indulge their baser instincts and become dangerous. Earlier in life, a product of Starfleet training that tried to be fair and even-handed, Tom had felt sympathy for these low-lifes who could never hope to reach the kind of level in society which Tom had inherited as a matter of course (as long as he did the bare minimum to deserve it). Enough painful encounters over the years had left him with no sympathy, just contempt – and some fear, because he knew people like this got their jollies from the feeling of control, of power, and they would stoop to most lengths to continue to get that gratification. Either you got out of their way, or you put them down, fast.

"You've been blabbing. Shooting your smart mouth off."

Sometimes, especially when his sense of natural justice was offended, Tom’s bravado kicked into high gear regardless of the consequences. He tried to suppress the tendency, was becoming more successful as time went on, but every now and then, it just slipped out.

“You wouldn’t know smart if it bit you,” he heard himself say, and winced inwardly, resigned himself to pain. Just for an instant, he was so incensed over the idea that this low-life could have any control over him at all, that he simply didn’t care.

Only for an instant though. Then he cared quite a bit.

Sleep didn’t come to Janeway despite her tiredness, and after nearly an hour of trying she gave up and ordered a coffee from the replicator, going to her desk terminal to get a head start on all the work that awaited her in the morning.

No more than another half hour and she realised she’d just read the same passage for the third time over. She got up and paced for a few minutes, trying to control the agitation pushing at the back of her mind.

How could she not have known something like this was going on? Possibly, she realised, because it didn’t make sense. To get home, the ship would need the talents and hard work of everyone on board – to remove possibly half the crew in a violent mutiny simply was not rational. Rational thought and behaviour was taught from the very beginning of a Starfleet career. Everyone you encountered within Starfleet, unless they had a diagnosable pathology, behaved rationally, especially the officers, because you simply could not graduate from Starfleet Academy without being tested and challenged and tested again, until the rational approach became your default way of thinking. People like – B’elanna Torres, who could not control her temper – simply washed out, no matter how technically good they might be. Both Cavit and her Chief Engineer had graduated at the tops of their classes and gone on to have solid careers, advancing steadily in rank until she accepted them for postings on Voyager. Cavit had been a junior officer on the Al-Batani, in Command track long before she switched from sciences. He had already moved to another ship when Janeway and Owen Paris had been taken by the Cardassians, but prior to that he’d been a solid and reliable officer. Just the sort she thought she needed for a new posting with a new ship – the sort who would take routine shipboard work off her hands and leave her to concentrate on the things she loved, scientific discovery; the purpose for which Voyager had originally been designed.

She had never considered that he wasn’t so well tested in extraordinary circumstances like the one they were in now. She’d been complacent that Voyager would be what it was always meant to be when she made those crew appointments. She had seen the ship as a first posting to advance her career so that in a year or two, after missions that were successful but routine, she could move on to a larger ship and a more challenging posting, secure in her ability to command; a proven captain with ambitions to advance rapidly in the service, to be the best, to beat personal records; selfish, selfish, selfish.

She ordered another coffee and stared out of the window, feeling nearly overwhelmed with self-realisation. What did they used to call it? The Time of the Wolf, that dead hour of the night when your personal demons rose to challenge you.

She saw Owen Paris’ face in her memory, firstly the confident, rather domineering, demanding mentor of her academy days, always pushing her to do more, achieve more, never accept anything but her own best efforts. She saw him going on to become the captain she would probably have followed anywhere, his personality dominating everything and anyone around him, then saw him transitioned to his older self, all spark gone from him as he withdrew from active command, gratefully accepted a token promotion to an undemanding earth-based post, broken by circumstances that had ultimately proved to be beyond his control. Was she heading in the same direction?

His son had the same eyes – that was the one thing that had immediately struck her the first time she’d seen Tom Paris in the New Zealand penal colony. Pale blue, alert, direct, they had disconcerted her a little, in a completely different face, different body, entirely different personality. He’d been edgy, flippant, not particularly respectful of her, and it had made her bristle a little. Of course, she’d never let that show, captains had to have more control over their behaviour than that. She’d recruited him for two reasons; one because he was the only person in custody who knew Chakotay’s Maquis cell, at least the only one likely to do a deal. Secondly, because of her respect for his father and pity for what had happened to him. She hadn’t expected much from Tom Paris but felt she owed the father to give the son another chance, to see if he would make more out of it than that poor choices he’d apparently been making for most of his life. And as soon as he’d stepped on board, he’d caused controversy and ill feelings. Something in the back of her mind had been pretty happy to put him out of sight and avoid the complexities of having to deal with the fact that he existed.

That decision was making her feel like a fool now. To ignore a problem rather than face it straight on was a cowardly way to behave and not, she had always believed, her normal behaviour. As a result of that behaviour Tom Paris had disappeared into the depths of the ship under the ‘care’ of her first officer, out of sight, out of mind, put to work to serve the ship, ostensibly in the same way everyone else had been.

Undoubtedly during that work he had heard things and seen things that might help her and Tuvok avert what now seemed like the almost-certainty of a mutiny. She should send Tuvok to speak with him.

Then she realised that she was still finding excuses to avoid dealing with him and knew she would have to go speak with him herself.

The darkness receded and Paris heard voices. For a few moments he couldn't make sense of what was being said, then his brain put itself back into alignment and the words became intelligible.

"…just passed out. Cavit told us to get you up here to check him."

"I've got better things to do with my time than chase after this weasel. Can't you be more careful?" He recognised the voice as Fitzgerald’s.

"Figured it wouldn't be a good idea to carry him down to sickbay." 

There was the faint whirr of a tricorder.

"He's all right. Bit dehydrated, which is probably why he passed out." Paris felt his arm being lifted; pain shot all the way up to his shoulder, he couldn't suppress a groan.

"You did this?" he heard Fitzgerald say. "I warned you before, especially you. Don't cross the line. I've had to clean up your messes one time too many already. Now get out of here, all of you. He'll sleep it off and be none the worse in a few days."

When the door had closed behind them, Paris managed to lift himself off the floor and crawled over to his bed, where he collapsed, laid his aching head on the cover and tried to ignore the vicious pain in his arm. 

It was going to be a long night.

Having made the decision to speak with Paris, Janeway did not leave it long to take action. She dressed, pinning her long hair up automatically so it was out of the way, and made her way down to his quarters, knowing that it was ridiculously early for someone to be awake, but feeling it would gain her the psychological advantage.

She was not completely surprised to discover that his door was on external override which would open the door from the outside if a code was entered. Her own command override of course did the trick. As the door swished open, revealing quiet darkness on the other side, she could just make out a dark lump hunched up, half in, half out of the small bunk underneath the dimly glowing panel that represented an internal bulkhead with conduits routed behind – no windowed quarters for any guests except VIPs, and in no-one’s imagination had he ever been that.

“Mr Paris?” she called into the room, cursing her ‘command voice’ for being just a little too compromised with uncertainty. It got the reaction she wanted though, there was immediate movement and the lump in the bed resolved itself quickly into a standing figure, looking extremely groggy and a little unsteady on his feet.

“Lights,” she called, and the room computer switched on the overheads to full illumination, which made him flinch and hold his hand up to his eyes for a couple of seconds before his sight adjusted.

“Captain?” he asked, sounding surprised and wary. She studied the picture he presented with some disgust. He'd slept in his coveralls, which were covered in grime, frayed at the edges and ripped in several places, even worse than when she'd seen them a few hours ago. He looked like he'd been wearing them continuously for days, if not weeks, and he didn't smell too sweet either.

She took in his dishevelled appearance, appraising him in silence. He didn't offer any comment. He sported a bruise along one cheekbone and one eye looked as though it might be rapidly turning into an impressive shiner. He’d been fighting. How – predictable. Just as well he didn’t have the opportunity to drink as well, as according to his records there was some history of him being discovered blotto and returned home after his Starfleet ‘resignation’. A sign of poor character.

"Let me guess," she finally commented. "You walked into a door."

"Got it in one." His sardonic response irritated her. She went to his replicator, intending to order a basic first aid kit, a little surprised that he hadn't thought of it himself. The replicator didn't respond, and after brief investigation, she realised it was completely off line. Maybe he had thought of it after all.

"How long has this been out of commission?" she demanded.

"Four months." His voice was flat and without any obvious emotion. This demanded a slight mental shift. How did he spend his allocated replicator rations for food without a basic replicator? She tried to think when, in all that time, she might have seen him in the mess hall, couldn't recall a single time, and told him so. 

"I don't go to the mess hall," he replied. "Starfleet crew only."

"You're Starfleet."

"Not according to Lt Commander Cavit, Captain. I was only a Starfleet observer in the Badlands."

She scowled, another thought occurring to her. "So where do the Maquis eat?"

"Yeah, excellent idea. I can see myself getting out of there alive, no problem."

She glared at him because her query hadn’t been specifically about him and he relented his sarcasm a touch, "I don't know what area's been put aside for them, Captain, but if I knew, the only way I would use that knowledge would be to make damn sure I stayed away from it."

It occurred to her that in those plain overalls he wore, he looked thinner than she remembered from when he came on board. Quite a bit thinner. She hadn’t noticed the previous day.

"Where have you been eating?" she asked him. He shrugged.

"Wherever I can."

“Replicator rations?”

“I don’t have any automatic rations. One a day, if I complete my work assignments.” One ration a day was a quarter of the standard allocation, and not enough to keep a dog alive. The words ‘wherever I can’ abruptly took on an entirely new meaning. She didn't like the notion that someone under her protection had been reduced to scavenging for scraps to stay alive, and she liked even less the implication that Cavit had denied them to him, or by extension, that no-one had cared enough to raise this issue with her. Her first impulse was to get him to the mess hall and ensure he ate, then she would take action about his denial of basic rights. Someone was going to have a very unpleasant interview with her, very soon.

She stepped forward and took his arm firmly. The flinch she felt at her touch was involuntary and more than just dislike of being touched. She let go of the arm and rolled up the sleeve. He obviously didn't want her to do it, but he didn't pull away or protest. Revealed on his forearm just below the elbows was an even dotting of what looked like a line of burns. They were recent and red and obviously hurt.

"How did this happen?" she demanded.

"Workplace accident." His face remained expressionless and his voice without inflexion.

"Has it been treated?" It was a question the answer to which she suspected she already knew.

"No."

"Has the Doctor seen it?"

He looked at her, obviously surprised. He clearly understood the implication of her question. 

"Yes," he replied, tonelessly. 

"All right, that's it." She'd had enough. She tapped her commbadge. "Janeway to Tuvok."

"Tuvok here, Captain," came the calm voice of her Vulcan security officer, no indication at all that she’d probably woken him from sleep.

"Meet me in Sickbay right away."

"On my way, Captain."

It was getting on for breakfast time now, and the medical crew habitually started their main shift of the day early, preparing Sickbay for action before people woke up and decided they needed help. Dr Fizgerald was there and so was his Vulcan nurse. Neither were speaking to each other, each absorbed in their own tasks. Fitzgerald looked up as Janeway marched into Sickbay. His respectful welcoming smile turned to something considerably less pleasant as he saw who followed her through the door.

"Oh, and what kind of trouble has Mr Paris managed to get himself into this time?"

She didn't waste time with pleasantries. "Clear Sickbay."

He blinked in surprise, "I beg your pardon?"

"Get out!" she hissed. "Now."

"Now just a minute…" Fitzgerald trailed into silence as he noticed that Janeway had been joined by Tuvok and that Tuvok's hand had moved to the phaser carried at his side. He re-checked the Captain's uncompromising expression and decided not to argue further. Gathering the nurse to his side with an imperious flick of his head, he strode out of the doors. They shut behind him.

"Computer," ordered Janeway, "Activate EMH."

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency…" the ship's emergency medical program popped instantly into being and looked around expectantly.

Janeway took Paris by the arm and steered him firmly towards the nearest biobed. 

"Scan him," she ordered the EMH. "He's been recently attacked. I also want to know all the things he's not telling me. If he's been damaged in the past few weeks or months, I want to know about it. I presume you can tell that from a deep tissue scan?"

"And your Chief Medical Officer…?"

"I expect you to do this."

The EMH shrugged, registering perhaps a mild surprise, and moved to comply. Paris sat on the biobed in silence, alternating between looking at Janeway, Tuvok and the Doctor. An uneasy silence prevailed.

"Hmm," the EMH pronounced. "Minor contusions and bruises, and a recent pattern of superficial burns down his left arm…." He broke off and glared up at Janeway. "What kind of accident produces such a regular pattern…"

"You have already worked out the answer," Janeway wasn’t in the mood for indulging the EMH’s normal fussy manner. "Go on scanning."

The EMH turned back to his patient and continued to run the tricorder over his head and down his other side. The holographic arm faltered as the tricorder was passed down Paris's back, and again he looked up at the captain, his expression subtly different.

"How did this happen?" he asked.

"Specify," she demanded.

"I really think I should discuss this with the patient…"

"You will discuss it with me." Janeway wasn’t in the mood for evasion.

"Captain, my program requires me to respect the Federation articles of law which lay down rights for privacy in…" she cut him off, impatient and trying not to give in to her growing anger.

"Mr Paris is a convicted Federation detainee in my custody. His civilian rights are suspended according to Federation penal code. You will describe your findings to me."

The EMH accepted this without further argument. "I'll have to use more sensitive instrumentation to pick up anything else, but on a preliminary scan, there is evidence of systematic damage going back weeks if not months. He has an upper tibia fracture that looks like it's been healed by someone with all the skill of a first year nursing student. There are numerous healed contusions, scrapes and burns on arms, legs and torso. There is evidence of at least one healed concussion, and a minor skull fracture which fortunately was treated with more skill than the tibia fracture. And…" he glanced up at the emotionless face of Tuvok, standing a few feet from the biobed, taking in all of the data like he was reading a crew rota report. "Captain, I recognise that Mr Paris may have to submit to your invasion of his privacy but…"

"Tuvok," Janeway interrupted the EMH, "Guard the door. Please."

"As you wish." Tuvok retreated another fifteen feet. Everyone else in the room knew that the distance wasn't great enough to prevent the sensitive Vulcan ears from picking up everything that was being said, but the concession evidently mollified the EMH enough to continue. He indicated that Janeway should follow him and went around to the other side of the biobed. Paris watched them go from the corner of his eye but didn't attempt to scoot round on the bed to follow. The EMH took an instrument from a nearby tray and used it to slit the already wrecked coverall from collar down to tailbone. He parted the edges to show Janeway the markings which still appeared red and livid; great parallel weals running horizontally across his back.

"When did this happen?" she demanded of Paris, her voice even to her own ears as cold as ice.

"Last week," he told her in a flat, matter of fact tone. "I stole some fruit from the mess hall when I was working there. Cavit caught me."

Janeway forced herself to breathe deeply and calmly. "He ordered this?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't seek treatment?"

"I'm not on Fitzgerald's Christmas list either. He'd already told me that he wouldn't treat any pain arising from disciplinary actions, because that way, I wouldn't 'get the benefit' of it." He articulated the last phrase very clearly.

A cold fury began to consume her. Not content with banning this young man from the officer's mess, confining him to quarters which contained no functioning replicator and re-attaching the ankle locator which she had undertaken he wouldn't have to wear again, her first officer, Starfleet's so-called finest, had evidently set out to starve him into submission, and when he had taken food that he literally needed to survive, had instigated a primitive and brutal punishment.

It didn't matter what Tom Paris had done in the past, he didn't deserve this.


	3. Chapter 3

The EMH put away his tricorder. "I need to make a more detailed scan now. Please go and lie down in the surgical bay."

Paris turned and met Janeway's eyes. "You know most of it - isn't that enough?" His look was pleading, anxious. Plainly there was more he didn't want her to know. For a moment she felt a wave of pity for him which almost prompted her to agree that this didn't have to be taken any further. But she knew that in order to pursue this, she would need evidence. She indicated the surgical bay with a jerk of her head. It was an order and he knew it. He obeyed without a word.

The scan took several minutes during which nobody spoke. The doctor watched the diagnostic screen as the results revealed themselves, and his expression became darker and darker. Finally he switched off the scanner and retracted the diagnostic arch. Paris sat up slowly, not making eye contact with any of them.

Janeway watched him, realising that this was a very different creature from the one she had seen when she’d gone to New Zealand to recruit him. This was no hot-head who would blow up at the slightest provocation, he was icy calm, completely controlled. 

Or maybe the description was blank. His emotions so bruised and battered by the last few months - under her command - that he had simply shut them down and couldn't feel anymore.

She had to know the full extent of what he had been subjected to.

"Well?" she asked the EMH. 

An accusing look in his eyes, he told her. Outlined the full catalogue of what the scans revealed. She stood, listening with growing disbelief. Paris simply sat, not responding, not reacting, his eyes focussed on nothing.

The EMH, registering that his patient was still sitting in a coverall which was now comprehensively de-seamed down the back, dug out and handed him standard sickbay sleepwear. It wasn't high fashion, but it was clean and snug. Paris took it and shrugged into it without even a flicker of rebellion, top half first, modesty intact.

So now Janeway had to deal with the fallout of her own willful ignorance, her blindness and complacency, and the results. She fell back on practicalities, because it was the easiest thing to deal with. She beckoned Tuvok back into the surgical bay.

"Tuvok, clearly, Paris is not safe from attack even in his own quarters. He must be moved to a more secure area."

"Many of the quarters on Deck nine can be…"

"I don't mean secure in the sense of preventing Paris from getting out, but in the sense of preventing unwelcome guests from getting in. There's a set of store rooms at the end of the passage where my quarters are located. Have them refitted as living quarters and move him into them. Anyone who wishes to access those rooms has to go past mine and a secondary door could also be situated at the beginning of that corridor.”

"They will be ready by tomorrow," Tuvok promised. Was it her imagination that even Tuvok was unwilling to look Paris in the eye? All this had happened on his watch just as much as hers – something she knew she would have to discuss with him before long. Not that it excused her in even the slightest degree that her security officer also hadn’t bothered to see what was right under his nose if he’d just looked up and taken stock for a moment.

She turned back to Paris. "You need some meat on your bones. Come on, we'll go find some food."

He followed her obediently as she marched out of Sickbay.

She was going to take him to the officer's mess, but changed her mind once they were in the turbolift and ordered deck 3 instead. Although he stood straight beside her, his head up, that, she felt, was more a matter of training than of any inner pride or strength. The look in his eyes was fragile and just a little nervous, and she didn't suppose that walking into the mess in sickbay garments would do much for what might be left of his dignity. She couldn't help noticing that his gaze darted in all directions almost continuously on the walk to the turbo lift, and he only settled once they were alone inside it. Given all the minor ailments the EMH had discovered, she hypothesised that he was used to taking a random knock or other, more subtle form of abuse from people who passed him in corridors. And the habit was so ingrained in him now that even standing next to the Captain he couldn't suppress the reflex.

She took him to her own quarters and pointed him in the direction of the replicator. "Order whatever you like," she told him. He stood thinking for so long that she started to wonder if he'd already passed the stage where he could actually take food without assistance. 

"Spinach juice, with pear," he finally decided, and the replicator produced a vilely healthy looking green drink. He picked it up and sipped at it for a moment, watching her watching him. A kind of humour snapped in his eyes for a second.

"You expected me to pick something alcoholic."

It was a statement, not a question, and she didn't refute it. He'd nailed her reaction absolutely.

"Why do you say that?" she asked.

"Everyone always assumes that because I'm a convict, I'm an alcoholic." He took another sip of his vegetable and fruit juice. "I’ve visited my share of dockside dives with the intention of getting blasted, but that was then. I like a good wine with a good meal, and that's about it."

She made another interior adjustment, now becoming accustomed to the feeling of surprise and chagrin which went with it. 

"Aren't you going to eat?" she asked.

He shrugged, "I can't decide. So many choices." His voice drifted off and his eyes lost focus as if he were talking more to himself than to her, "after a while, you forget how."

Not knowing if he was vegetarian, she played it safe and ordered an oriental medley for two, which arrived as six separate plates of vegetables, nuts, fruit and noodles. She carried them over to her table and indicated that he should sit. He lowered himself cautiously into the chair opposite her and eyed the steaming food with something resembling lust.

"Dig in," she suggested. He didn't need prompting twice. She watched in silence as he ate, steadily but rapidly. He still retained an echo of the Admiralty manners that would no doubt have been drummed into him from the day he could handle his own flatware; she saw it in the way he held the fork and handled the plates, the way he ate with his mouth closed rather than like a Klingon tearing meat from a dead Targ, and by his posture in the chair. He didn’t make eye contact with her while he was eating, possibly too self-conscious about the revelations she had heard in Sickbay, but she did notice his eyes flickering about the room occasionally, assessing the space. It must have seemed sumptuous to a rankless visitor used to one of the smallest cabins available on board. She didn’t let herself feel guilty, the captain’s cabin was an earned privilege, and she’d worked hard for it. 

After he’d had a chance to demolish most of the food, she decided it was time to gather some more information, and asked him, "Can you give me the names of the Maquis who did this?" Finished for now, Paris laid his fork down on the table and sat back slightly.

"What makes you think they were all Maquis, Captain?"

She narrowed her eyes at him. "They don't like you."

He raised a surprised eyebrow at her with just a touch of defensive bravado in it. "Neither does anyone in Starfleet, including my own family."

Obscurely, it reassured her. Bloodied and bowed, he wasn't broken. Not yet, and he wasn't going to be if she had any say in the matter, which she did. "But the Maquis don't like you even more," she pointed out.

"Granted the Maquis tend to be - unsubtle," he agreed, "but they're not exactly integrated into the crew. They wouldn't have had the access on their own."

"Access - to your quarters?"

He shook his head. "That was only the last couple of days. Access to my movements, assignments, where I was working, and who with, and enough advance knowledge to be there before me."

She suppressed a shudder as she imagined herself in his situation, arriving in a theoretically deserted area of the ship to do some menial task, skin crawling with fear, realising he was alone and out of contact and there was nothing he could do to stop what was going to happen to him. And probably wondering if, this time, he would live through it, or if he would want to. Months and months of living like that, not even knowing where his next bite of food was coming from, and yet, looking at him now, he retained his trained Starfleet posture, and there was still life in his eyes. He was far, far stronger than she'd given him credit for when they'd first met. Maybe there was a little something of Owen Paris about him after all. 

“When did it start?” she persisted.

“Pretty much the first week we were here.”

"And you didn't report it?"

He shrugged, "There was no point."

“No point reporting an assault by crewmembers in a deserted part of the ship?”

He finally looked up and met her gaze directly.

"No, Captain. There was no point, because the people I would have reported it to already knew."

She felt herself bristle at the implication, and for the very tiniest moment wondered if that meant that Tuvok was also implicated. "That is a very serious accusation."

He shrugged slightly, sounding disinterested in her sudden sharp tone. "It was an observation."

She couldn't leave it at that and asked the question directly. "Are you saying that either the doctor or Lt Commander Cavit were involved in this?" She already knew, of course, that Fitzgerald had seen the results of the latest attack and his attitude towards discipline; Paris had told her quite clearly, which was why she’d had the EMH assess him, but in the back of her mind, she’d chalked that up to casual negligence, not a deliberate and ongoing campaign of cruelty.

"Maybe not directly but - they knew," he told her.

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because it was Cavit who assigned all my work there, and the times of my shifts, which were inconsistent, and there was no reason for anyone to know where or when I was, or to go down there for any other reason." It sounded flawlessly logical.

"And why did the Doctor know?" she persisted.

"Because he would have treated them. First time I broke an arm, a collar bone, and a nose. Not all on the same person."

She felt a sudden impulse to smile but suppressed it. His comment had been without bravado; a matter of fact statement as to the damage he could inflict when cornered, but for some reason, it cheered her. For a half-starved young man set upon by at least three assailants, it wasn't a bad score at all. Chalk up another credit to Academy training. "And your injuries?"

"I let them heal on their own."

"Why?"

"Scar tissue. More evidence. Captain, I was pretty angry about it. Still am, as a matter of fact. If you had found us a quick way home, I would have sued Starfleet - and you. I would have destroyed the careers of everybody involved. And yours."

She was surprised at the complete candour of his admission, and it must have showed on her face, because he responded with just a touch more heat than he’d shown so far, "I’m pretty sick of being treated like a nobody because I have a history that people don’t approve of and because they think they have the right to judge me and act on it. Every time I've tried to pick myself up, there's always been someone like Cavit waiting to knock me down. It's impossible to break out of because everyone knows your name and your past. But I don't have to tolerate it when the law is on my side." 

"I'm reassured that you have enough self-esteem left to stand up for yourself."

It was his turn to look surprised. “You’re the first Starfleet person I’ve met in five years that thought I should have any self-esteem. My family certainly don’t.”

She could understand that part easily enough. While Owen Paris had been an invaluable mentor to her in her early career, she was under no illusions as to how demanding, exacting and yes, even judgemental he was. Confronted with evidence of his son’s mistakes, she had no doubt his reaction would have made anyone feel worthless and belittled and as far as she was aware, there was no mother to balance out or temper his reactions. When Tom Paris had come forward and made his statement as to his culpability in the accident that had taken the lives of three officers, and with his father still undoubtedly suffering the effects of his incarceration and torture by the Cardassians, Janeway realised that Tom Paris must have lost, not just his Starfleet career on that day, but also his family. While she could imagine one or the other, she had no frame of reference at all for how destructive that must have been to a young man barely in his twenties. That he’d gone out and found activities that were almost suicidally dangerous wasn’t really much of a stretch. That he’d survived them spoke to his training, aptitude and intelligence.

It didn’t really explain why he’d waited for months to involve her – surely he must have known she would listen to him and investigate? "Why didn't you contact me directly, Mr Paris?" she asked him, trying not to make it sound like an accusation.

Paris gave her an odd, rather sardonic look, and demonstrated the effect of calling her over the comm system. She sat back, frowning. "No member of the crew should be restricted like that. One relies on protocols and discipline not to call senior officers unnecessarily."

"Most of the crew have restricted access of one kind or another," he told her. He appraised her expression carefully. "I thought you were aware of it."

"No I wasn't. Cavit again?"

“Who else?”

“Are you implicating Mr Tuvok too?” She had to know, to get it out of the way.

“No, I just couldn’t get to him most of the time and, well, he was with the Maquis, so I wasn’t sure he would take me seriously. Things would have been worse if he hadn’t.” He caught her eye and a ghost of a grin flitted over his face. “Who knew what they’d told him. I wasn’t the most – amenable – of human beings back then.”

“Why did you join the Maquis?” she asked him. The Maquis were a pseudo-military organisation, by all accounts. If he’d been wanting to get far away from the strictures of Starfleet it didn’t seem like a natural fit. 

He shrugged. “I needed some excitement and Chakotay needed a pilot.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not at the time. I guess I wanted to do something that would ‘stick it’ to Starfleet and really annoy my father. And those colonists – they got treated pretty badly. I don’t blame them for wanting to strike back, and blowing away a few Cardassians wasn’t going to trouble my conscience. I wanted to annoy my dad but – I also wanted to get back at them for what they’d done to him.”

“How much of it did you know?”

He avoided meeting her eyes. “More than Starfleet wanted me to. Enough, I guess. No details but… I didn’t need them did I? I saw the state he came home in.” He gave no indication whether he’d known that she had been involved in that terrible mission gone wrong, and she saw no reason to pry. Hopefully, he had no clue.

“I should have gone back,” he concluded in the saddest tone she’d yet heard from him. “I should have tried again when he’d had a chance to cool down.”

There was a long silence. Janeway didn’t say anything out loud, because she had a clear sense that it would have appeared patronizing, but she got the impression that she was listening to the ‘adult’ Tom Paris talking, and that might be a relatively new state for him. Plus, the opportunity had gone both ways, and if the older and wiser Owen Paris hadn’t made a move towards reconciliation (the Admiral had certainly known where to find his son in the final few months before the Badlands expedition), maybe expecting Tom to make all the running wasn’t entirely reasonable.

She decided to move the topic of conversation to something that had less potential for personal awkwardness.

"You've had some emergency medical field training, haven't you?" she asked.

"Yes, Captain," he responded. She thought he looked a little relieved to be changing topics too.

"Is that why you've avoided taking your - accidents to Dr Fitzgerald?"

"At first I tried to pick a time he wasn't there and see the EMH instead. He may have the worst bedside manner in the quadrant but he's efficient and quick. First couple of times it worked fine, then Fitzgerald walked in on us. Next time I tried, voice access wouldn't respond, I couldn't bring him on line."

"That will change. You'll have complete access to the EMH and I'll issue standing orders that he's to treat you in future." Not, she thought to herself, that Tom Paris would have any more trouble with Fitzgerald when she had finished with him. 

Now there just remained the immediate problem of what to do with him from here onwards, and in particular, right now. He was the son of her mentor, and at the moment, he probably wouldn't be safe even in the Brig. Besides, confining him to yet another jail cell when he had done nothing to deserve it went against every idea of fair play and natural justice that she had spent fifteen years in Starfleet developing. There was only one reasonable solution short term, and she found she didn't much care that it might start rumours.

"Your new quarters will be ready tomorrow," she told him. "Until then, you'll sleep there." She indicated her couch and went to find him a spare blanket and pillow, ignoring his surprised expression. When she came back, he had already cleared the table. He accepted the bedding and stood clutching it, still looking a little dazed as if he really couldn't believe that a senior officer might just be offering him a kindness with no strings attached.

She told him to get whatever he needed from the replicator if he was still hungry or thirsty and debated to herself if she should just go to the bridge early for Alpha shift or accept that she wasn’t going to make it that morning and try to get a couple more hours sleep. She decided on the latter. The captain's quarters was one of the few on the ship which had a bedroom totally separated from the other rooms and with a lockable door. She locked it on principle, although her instincts told her she had little to fear from him. He was as quiet as a mouse and didn't disturb her, and when, restless and bothered, she came out to get herself a hot drink, her presence didn't wake him. He was fast asleep, curled up almost completely under the blanket. She was glad that he felt secure enough not to jump like a frightened deer as she walked past him.

He really had a rather sweet face, she reflected, standing sipping her hot tea and looking down at him from a distance calculated not to wake him but near enough to get a reasonable view. He was not that much like his father, having a longer, more angular appearance, and the nose must have come from his mother. But sleeping like this there wasn't a trace of the arrogant bearing which had so irritated her on the first few occasions she'd met him, or the smart mouth, ever ready with a quick comeback.

Here was a young man who had started life filled with promise and all the advantages being the son of a Starfleet Admiral could bring. And before his twenty fifth birthday, he had been branded a liar and a coward, and called traitor both by the courts who had convicted him and the people he had left behind in the Badlands. She'd decided before she’d even met him that his situation was due entirely to poor character and poor judgement. Now, she wondered how much might have been due to circumstance, and how she might have fared in similar circumstances. Had she never in her life been tempted to lie to get herself out of a difficult situation, or to cover up something she knew would have brought her father embarrassment and pain? Magnify that temptation by tenfold, put her in the situation of having done something monumentally stupid out of carelessness or confidence, and who was to say that events might not have spiralled out of control and landed her in a place similar to the one he was in now?

She found it hard to get back to sleep after that and gave up, going to the bridge halfway through Alpha shift and leaving him asleep.

First business of the day for her was an unpleasant one. She called Cavit and Fitzgerald into her ready room and read them the riot act. Comprehensively. Told them how she’d discovered Paris in his room, how there was no question that he’d been the victim of an attack and showed Fitzgerald the log of his accessing Paris’ quarters so she knew that he’d failed to treat him. 

"I don't give a damn whether you like Mr Paris or whether you don’t," she concluded, when she'd finished browbeating her chagrined officers, "but you will remember that, his state of freedom notwithstanding, he is a civilian guest on board this ship, and that Federation law gives him basic rights and dignities which go beyond even those of Starfleet Personnel. I need every single person on this ship to be at their best to get us home, and frankly, I need you both to keep this ship running, which is the only reason you’re not in the Brig right now. Your behaviour has been disgraceful and unbecoming of Starfleet Officers, and it will stop now.”

She raked both of them with an unyielding glare. "Mr Paris has four months worth of back credit coming to him in replicator rations. Part of that will come out of your rations." She eyed Fitzgerald malevolently. "He will have unrestricted access at all times to the EMH." 

"Understood, Captain." Doctor Fitzgerald replied, very quietly, still resentful but intelligent enough not to show it in front of his displeased commanding officer.

"And you," Janeway turned to Cavit, "will find other crew members to scrub the Dilithium converters and warp plasma manifolds from now on. Apart from the fact that it puts him in a position where he's obviously in danger from attack, he's a highly educated product of the most prestigious academy in the Federation. Attitude or otherwise, if he didn't have the brains, he wouldn't have graduated. I will find something more appropriate for him to do."

Cavit didn't reply; it was clear he was seething, but he nodded once. Janeway chose to take that as a sign of compliance for now. 

"Gentlemen, you are both Senior Starfleet Officers. I don't expect a recurrence of this kind of petty behaviour from either of you. If you can't manage to live up to my expectations, you will live up to lesser expectations as Junior officers. Do I make myself clear?"

Both of them snapped to attention. "Yes sir!" they both chanted, exactly as they would have done at the Academy when faced with an irate tutor.

She nodded, mollified for now. "Dismissed." She had chosen not to mention just how involved Cavit had been in the events culminating in Paris’ last attack. She had no actual proof of his involvement – although Paris’ reasoning had put a very good case and she certainly intended to have Tuvok investigate. If Cavit thought the matter was going to end here, he was no doubt in for a nasty surprise once she was in possession of all the facts. 

When they had departed the room, she sat down at her desk and let out a long breath. She had never liked dealing with matters of discipline; offhand, she couldn't think of any commander who did. It was also time to do some investigations of her own. According to Paris, it wasn’t just him who had been unfairly treated since they’d arrived. She had to understand the situation for herself so she could decide what to do about it – if anything at this stage could make up for her criminal lack of leadership until now. 

She called Tuvok into her office and voiced her displeasure about the restrictions of communication protocols.

“I want a set of recommendations on my desk for new protocols by the end of the day,” she told him. “I also want a full analysis of the extent of the changes made by Cavit and who they have been applied to. I could make the assumption that only Mr Paris’ access was restricted, given the level of negative opinion that seems to have developed about him, but I’m not prepared to take anything for granted. You’re security chief. Find out.”

“I already have that information, Captain.” Tuvok told her, his normal demeanour not giving away any implication that he had either pre-empted her request or knew about it anyway. She decided not to interrogate him on the subject just yet. Once she had a full picture, she’d decide what to do about not having been informed. In the back of her mind she had a small suspicion that the information had been presented to her, in one of those routine reports which, being too crazed with work trying to fix the warp engines, she had probably glanced at and simply signed off, trusting that all was as it should be.

She also set Tuvok the task of reviewing the logs to put together any evidence that might exist as to Cavit’s culpability in arranging Paris’ work shifts so as to facilitate ambush. Tom Paris hadn’t precisely issued an accusation, but if he was right – and she thought he might well be – there was going to be a reckoning.

After Tuvok she called Stadi into her office and told her to sit down, choosing to indicate the couch rather than opposite sides of the desk. She hoped that if the lieutenant was more at ease she might be more forthcoming. It didn’t look all that likely, her Chief Con Officer looked awkward and a little intimidated but complied.

"Lieutenant, you've been spending off duty time with Tom Paris, I understand."

Stadi shifted uncomfortably, "Yes, Captain."

"Running holodeck programs?"

"Yes Captain." Stadi evidently couldn't bear the implication that she'd done wrong and burst out, "He doesn't have any holodeck time of his own. I didn't think it was fair just to leave him in his quarters."

Janeway filed away another piece of damning evidence. No holodeck privileges. “Lt Commander Cavit issued the holodeck schedule, are you saying Mr Paris’ lack of time was an oversight, or a deliberate omission?”

Stadi laughed, a hard sarcastic laugh Janeway had never heard her helmsman make before. "Everyone knows what Cavit thinks of Tom."

"Most people seem to agree with him," Janeway probed.

"Most people can't…" Stadi stopped to order her thoughts before attempting to explain further. "He's not like that inside. It's just a shell. He's in pain. Flying in the simulations helps to dull the pain."

Janeway didn't bother to ask how she knew; Stadi was Betazoid, undoubtedly she knew exactly what emotions Tom Paris had been feeling while he was in contact with her. 

"What is your opinion of Mr Paris' piloting skills?" Janeway asked Stadi, getting right to the point. Her pilot's reaction was interesting. It was as if she was afraid of answering, and she hesitated long enough that Janeway had to prompt her. "The truth, please."

Stadi looked up at her, trepidation in those big chocolate brown eyes. "He's brilliant," she admitted. "He's the best pilot I've ever seen."

“So those reports at least are accurate.” Every entry in Paris’ file said more or less the same, but it was nice to get it confirmed with some first-hand experience.

Now Janeway knew why Stadi was afraid. If he was that good, she probably felt he should have been flying the ship for real instead of her. Stadi was good at her job, she was a capable, steady pilot, but inexperienced in extreme conditions. She probably felt herself that she could put the ship in danger during a battle, and that a more experienced pilot wouldn't. But Janeway knew how much Stadi loved to fly this ship; she was in love with Voyager, her responsiveness and speed and beauty. She didn't want to have to give way to another pilot.

"Have you checked him out on shuttles, too?" she asked Stadi.

The younger woman nodded. "He's just as good. He can fly them in conditions I wouldn't dare to go..."

"So how do you explain…"

"Caldik Prime?" Stadi interrupted, her voice filled with conviction and a passion for this particular subject that Janeway suspected was a result of a strong identification with Paris over the circumstances. Stadi had rarely shown the will to talk back to her senior officers but she obviously felt there was a serious point to be made.

"I know what happened on Caldik Prime, Captain. Paris told me. He was overconfident and he made a mistake. It was a mistake any pilot could have made under pressure - I've done it myself, in simulation. The difference is, my teacher stopped the simulation and gave me a talking to. Tom killed three people. He won't ever make that mistake again, or any like it."

"That doesn't alter the fact that…"

"Tom lied about it. That was a dreadful thing to do. It wasn't like he was caught out. If he hadn't come forward and confessed to it, he'd still be in Starfleet, he'd probably have been flying one of the big cruisers, and no one would have been any the wiser. But he had that much integrity. He knew what would happen. He knew that people like Cavit would write him off for the rest of his life."

"I'm surprised that you of all people would befriend him. No, don't get offended," she stalled Stadi's response, "I didn't mean that the way it obviously sounded. But if he's as good as you say, you are the one person on board who has reason to feel threatened by his presence here."

Stadi couldn't respond to that and averted her eyes, both ashamed and afraid.

"It's alright, Lieutenant, I wouldn't consider replacing you at Voyager's helm," Janeway reassured her, eliciting a brief, hopeful smile in return. "But another pilot would be useful on shuttle missions, and if he's that good, it seems a pity to waste him on the kind of work Cavit's been assigning him to."

"Cavit's a jerk." Stadi said flatly, then looked up with a flash of panic. "I'm sorry, I…"

"It's off the record, Stadi," Janeway soothed. "Anyway, it's a sentiment I'm starting to appreciate." Janeway was starting to see a whole new side of her first officer, one she wouldn't have suspected even existed. A dark, unpleasant, vicious streak which had only come out under the pressure of their present situation. 

Now that she had Stadi’s engagement in the subject, she decided to probe a little deeper.

"Stadi, this is not a criticism, but were you aware that the replicator in Mr Paris' room had been disabled?"

"Yes Captain."

"Were you also aware that Paris has been attacked on a number of occasions?"

Stadi looked ashamed again, perhaps picking up on the renewed pulse of Janeway's own anger as she thought about that particular subject. "Yes, Captain."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I - " It obviously took quite a lot of courage for her to continue. "We thought all the commanders felt the same way about Tom. We thought you knew, or that if you didn't, you wouldn't care."

"I see." Marvellous to have a crew with such solid faith in her ethics and morality.

"We have been trying to keep him safe," Stadi offered without prompting, possibly ashamed of her own assumptions or failure to at least try to raise the issue.

"We?" Janeway prompted, catching the use of the plural.

"Myself, Ensign Kim. There are some others but…"

"You're Bridge Officers. The crew respects you."

"He's safer with us, but we can't be with him all the time, and Cavit hasn't allowed him to be assigned to work where one of us can keep an eye on him."

"Rather the opposite.” Janeway decided that there was no negative implication to sharing details with her helmsman, and calculated it might help Stadi to trust her a little more if she was aware that investigations were already underway. She was pretty certain nothing she said would get back to Cavit. “There is evidence that Tom has been deliberately assigned to places and tasks where he is in particular danger of attack."

"Some people - " Stadi trailed off.

"Go on, please, I want you to feel free to say what you think."

"Some people think that us being here is Tom's fault."

She had a hard time believing a supposedly intelligent and educated group of people could be that stupid. "That's ridiculous."

“I know, but we were following his course when we were taken.”

“That just makes him a convenient object to blame."

Stadi’s head moved in a slightly random way which may have indicated agreement, but with underlying doubts. Janeway chose to interpret it that way and probed a little further. “You think there’s more to it than that.”

Stadi let out a long, slow breath and finally dropped the last vestiges of reserve she’d maintained throughout their conversation. Perhaps she’d picked up Janeway’s genuine intent or finally understood that her interest was benevolent. “Tom doesn’t do himself any favours when he interacts with people he doesn’t know. He came on to me pretty strongly when I flew him to Deep Space Nine. Don’t misunderstand me, he knew the line and he didn’t cross it, but it’s like he has to play someone else when he’s with people he doesn’t know. And he’s very good at it. I didn’t know what he was doing, and I can normally tell. It wasn’t until we first saw Voyager that… I can’t explain to non-telepaths but it was like a different person beamed into the shuttle. Now that I know him, I see that shield going up and down every day. It puts people off balance, it…” she floundered around for a way to describe it, “It raises hackles.”

“I understand what you mean.” Janeway thought back again to that first meeting in the prison colony. Her hackles had been right up and pointed straight at Paris. It amused her to think that he might have been deliberately playing her; after all, there wasn’t any reason why anyone from Starfleet should have got special consideration from him and he’d probably seen her as an extension of his father’s influence.

“Are you also aware,” she asked Stadi, “That Paris has been allocated limited rations?”

“I knew he had to work for them, and it was obvious he wasn’t getting as much as he should.”

“One a day, he told me.”

Stadi stared at her, appalled. “He didn’t say it was that bad.”

“It’s possible he was lying to me.”

“I don’t think he would, Captain. Tom – doesn’t really lie. He’s very good at not telling the truth, but not by telling you something that isn’t true.”

“He couldn’t have survived on one ration for four months,” Janeway pointed out. At the same time as she was saying the words, something else occurred to her which she didn’t voice. It was very possible that Tom Paris, or at least the Tom Paris that she’d encountered over the last couple of days, had intended to allow himself to be starved to the point of actual collapse, knowing (as he would have done) that it would have to be reported to the Captain. Her knowledge of Earth history was sufficient to understand that a long time ago prisoners did sometimes go on ‘hunger strike’ to make a protest or a political point.

“Ensign Kim and I have been using our replicator rations to feed him, and sometimes B'Elanna Torres helps," Stadi told her, breaking into her tangential thought.

"That's the young Maquis engineer who's been hanging around with Kim quite a lot recently. The one we rescued from the Ocampa?" Janeway asked. 

"Yes ma'am."

Perhaps the fact that Paris had had some friends and supporters on board had prevented the situation from coming to crisis point earlier. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing in the long run, but totally understood how someone in that situation would have been tempted to fall back on the good nature of his friends rather than see through something so drastic. 

"I'm relieved to hear that Mr Paris managed to find some supporters among the crew,” she told Stadi, “although I'm less surprised about it than I would have been yesterday."

"Captain?" Stadi clearly didn't understand the context of Janeway's remark, and she smiled down at the younger woman. 

"You are probably aware that I served under his father several years ago."

"Yes, Captain," Stadi confirmed, her tone cautious.

"I can't say that communication between Paris and myself was entirely successful when we first met. I've certainly never taken the time to sit down with him, get to know him a little, until yesterday. I must admit I was surprised."

"Tom does come as a surprise," Stadi's quick smile betrayed what was probably quite a deep affection for him.

"Lt, have you been sleeping with Mr Paris?" Janeway asked her on an abrupt impulse.

She blushed, but didn’t flinch away from answering. "If you mean, have we been having sex, the answer is no, Captain. I have a partner at home. But he has slept in my quarters on occasion, and sometimes in Ensign Kim's.”

“Stadi, I want you to know that I intend to make some changes, effective immediately. I would welcome any suggestions you might have to start improving conditions on this ship. Will you please convey that to your Conn team? There will be new communications protocols issued later today, I will expect everyone to take them on board.”

“Yes Captain.” Was it Janeway’s imagination, or did Stadi suddenly look a lot happier than when she’d entered the room. Her face lit up with the first genuine smile Janeway thought she’d seen on her helmsmans’ face since they’d entered the Delta Quadrant. Little things, baby steps. Things were going to get better. They had to.

She hadn’t forgotten about Seska, though.


	4. Chapter 4

Paris woke, realised he was on someone’s couch, which was not a completely unfamiliar situation to him, then realised whose couch it was. He experienced a rush of relief, then a little apprehension, because apprehension in unfamiliar rooms was normal. He checked the chronometer on Janeway’s desk and found that he’d slept nearly seven hours, which was unheard of for him, probably since the last time he’d slept in his own bed at home, and that was a lot of years behind him. Janeway’s desk terminal was flashing with a waiting message for him so, tentatively, he touched the ‘initiate’ symbol. It was text only, and said,

‘Don’t leave until I have sorted things out. Use the bathroom and the replicator as you wish, and get some new clothes. You do not have to wear work overalls. I have unlocked your computer access, so keep yourself occupied.’

Thinking back to the conversation of the previous night, Paris started to uncoil a little inside. He’d done it. He’d got the Captain’s ear and told her the things she needed to know, and it seemed as though she already believed him.

An unpleasant smell assaulted his nose and he realised it was him. Plus, he needed to pee, so he went into the bathroom – a little tentatively because it was her personal space. He stopped in the doorway and stared for a moment. The woman had a bath! ‘Captain’s privilege,’ he reminded himself, starting to smile. Most captains wouldn’t have bothered, but it told him quite a lot about her. First, it was a deep, luxurious bath, so she liked to wallow. Second, it was big, so it was entirely possible she liked to share it, which meant she probably had a partner waiting at home. That might, he realised, explain the picture on one of the shelves, of Janeway in uniform sitting on grass with an older man and a lovely Red Setter dog sitting between them. Like Stadi, like Kim, she had left loved ones behind. Like most of the crew probably, he thought, experiencing a slight stab of envy. There was no one left behind at home who gave a damn whether he was still alive or not, including, as he’d told Janeway last night, his own family.

He didn’t dare to use the bath but cleaned himself up thoroughly in the sonic shower before, towel-wrapped and hoping she didn’t come back until he’d had a chance to get decent, he replicated some plain but blessedly civilian clothes, gave the replicator the wrong size because he’d lost so much flesh under Cavit’s unyielding regime, and had to recycle them and start again. Then he replicated coffee and breakfast and sat down at the table to eat and explore what parts of the computer she’d just opened up for him – pretty much everything, as it turned out. Either she had made an assessment and decided to trust him, or she was testing him to see what he would explore. He chose to go with the second assumption and was careful not to delve into any areas that could be considered ‘sensitive’ but confined himself to looking at things which would normally be standard review files for an incoming officer on a new starship. Even though he wasn’t an officer, and was never likely to be, they were standard familiarisation protocols and were in any case a good place to start – top level ship specification, interior layout (which he already knew inside-out), crew duties and assignments, and technical specs at a more detailed level for the flight control and related systems. He figured out the chances of Janeway actually letting him fly Voyager for real were pretty low, but he wanted to be ready, just in case. He’d already learned nearly all that he needed to on a purely practical level, thanks to Stadi and her holodeck time, but he needed to back that up with theoretical limits and programming that practical experience didn’t teach you.

Overall it was a quiet but thoroughly agreeable day. A couple of times he stopped working, ordered another drink or a snack, and stood by the vast picture windows in her quarters, watching the star trails. It had to be by far the best view on the ship, straight forward over the upper hull and into the direction of travel. Almost the same view he’d be seeing if he were flying the ship. The breaks gave his mind a chance to consolidate all of the information he was trying to quickly absorb, but it was also a chance to wander. He kept coming back to – how could he be useful if he couldn’t fly the ship? It wasn’t his only skill but it was the only skill he’d really rated as important ever since his father had first let him take the controls of an old runabout, back when he was only just big enough to reach all of the panels. He had to find something else that the Captain would value enough to keep him in her inner circle. 

When Janeway handed over the bridge to Cavit that evening and returned to her room, she had almost forgotten the orders she had given the previous day regarding the re-organising of living space along her corridor. Rounding the corner from the main public corridor she stopped dead and stared at the door which blocked what had once been her access corridor.

Tuvok appeared at her elbow as if by magic.

"Your instructions have been carried out, Captain. This door is cleared for your, mine and Mr Paris' access codes only."

She keyed in her code and the doorway swished open, revealing the same corridor that had been there when she left for the bridge that morning, with the same two doors in it; hers and the one that had led to a small suite of underused store rooms. Rather than go directly to her own suite, she walked past her door and up to the other.

"What have you coded this one for, Tuvok?"

"In normal use, just Mr Paris. Do you wish me to add your access code as well?"

"No, no, that's fine. I want to approve what you've done though." She motioned to him to key in a security override and stepped through into Paris' new home.

"Make sure that command override only responds to our personal security codes, Mr Tuvok, yours and mine. Not Cavit's, or anyone else's."

"Understood, Captain."

Being next to the Captain's quarters, the rooms were situated along the outside hull of the deck and thus had two windows, one in each of the main rooms. Neither were picture windows like hers and they had a view more to the side than the front. The ceiling was much more markedly sloped than her own, representing confirmation with the outer contours of the ship's hull. The outer room of the quarters was fairly sparse, containing a single lounger, a larger than normal work area and a smaller circular table.

"We were unable to replicate a casual area, given the time available, and the replicator will have to be moved from another location tomorrow morning." Tuvok explained, seeing her bemused look. She nodded her understanding. The room looked very bare, which was no doubt why Tuvok had attempted to compensate by increasing the size of the working table.

The inner room contained a standard Starfleet issue bed, much wider and more comfortable than the tiny thing in his previous quarters, another lounger, and had been partitioned into the one larger and two smaller sections, one for the bathroom and the other for the wardrobe. Looking into the bathroom, she couldn't see anything missing.

"We did achieve a complete set of plumbing," Tuvok told her.

"So I see. Good job, Tuvok. Are the environmental controls operational?"

"Fully functional, Captain."

Dismissing Tuvok with further congratulations and thanks, she proceeded out into the corridor and into her own quarters. As soon as she was through the door, she stopped walking and blinked with surprise.

She was normally quite a tidy person, but a Captain's life was a busy one which left little time for domestic niceties. The last few weeks had been even worse than usual, and the one thing that had fallen by the wayside was her taking the few necessary minutes every day to keep the place tidy, or to set up a cleaning routine for computer maintenance to follow. When she had left earlier there had been things scattered all over the place. Now the place was meticulously tidy and spotlessly clean. There was no way she had left it like this this morning.

"I hope you don't mind," Tom Paris asked, standing up as soon as he registered her presence. "I didn't have that much to do today, got a bit restless." He had been sitting at her desk with one of her printed books, a couple of padds and another glass of that vile green juice.

It occurred to her to feel offended at the invasion of her privacy; but other than the clothing, there was very little in the way of personal items in her quarters. She probably had more souvenirs and personal possessions in her Ready Room than in here, a space she mostly used for washing and sleeping. She hadn't had time before they left for the Badlands to accumulate anything substantial in the way of clothes or books, and had lived in her uniform ever since, but there had been plates and glasses and towels and other domestic detritus scattered around. So she made the conscious decision not to be offended at his presumption.

"What are you working on?" she asked him, indicating the padd.

"Oh, this? Stadi and Harry and I've been working on extending the range of the Voyager flight simulation," he told her. "I've been reading up on Holo Programming Algorithm construction when I have the time, seemed a good opportunity to take in a few chapters."

"And you've been browsing my library, I see."

"Well, if you can call three books a library, yes.” He picked up the book, closed it and returned it to its place on the shelf. “I read this when I was sixteen. My father would call it ‘an improving work’. I prefer 20th century fiction myself."

“Really?” she found herself interested to find out what fired his imagination. “What kind of fiction?”

He laughed, and it seemed a very natural, unforced sound which made him seem more relaxed than she’d probably ever seen him, “Oh, Jules Verne of course, Asimov, Heinlein.”

“A phenomenon they used to call ‘Science Fiction’ I believe.”

“Yes, it’s interesting what people back then thought the future might be like,” he responded, “but they’re also good adventure stories with good characters.”

“I didn’t have much time for anything except science as a child,” she admitted to him. “My sister was always pestering me to go out and play games, or have fun with her friends, but who wants to do that when there’s math problems to solve?” she waved the obvious answer away, “I know, most of humanity.”

“My sisters were always telling me to study more and stop running around with my head in the clouds, or my nose buried in a book about giant octopuses or space fighters.”

“You got into the Academy though, so you must have done enough. The Academy doesn’t play favourites, even with the children of Admirals.” Janeway went and ordered a coffee from her replicator, not bothering to ask him if he wanted anything as the glass on the desk in front of him was more than half full.

“I never really wanted to go to the Academy as a child,” he replied. “I wanted to be part of the Federation Naval Service.”

“And sail around looking for giant squid?

They both laughed.

“I grew out of that quite early,” he told her, “but I always loved the water; sailing, diving, water sports. It wasn’t until I realised the only way I could do what I was really good at – flying – was by graduating and serving in Starfleet, then I started to take Dad’s advice seriously. I ended up cramming for a term in a dedicated pre-academy college to get through the entrance requirements. Most miserable time of my life – at least until I hit about 22.”

That caused an awkward silence, which Janeway broke by telling him about the rooms she’d had prepared next door. 

“It will be a safe environment until we work out how to de-fuse this entire situation,” she told him. “But your replicator – your working replicator – won’t be installed until tomorrow. This evening, I’m afraid you’re stuck eating with me again.”

“This is the nicest day I’ve had in a long time,” he told her, “I don’t suppose eating with you is going to ruin it.” For a moment, she was shocked at his apparent rudeness, then she saw the twinkle in his eye and realised he was actually teasing her. It was an odd sensation – nobody teased the Captain on their own Starship. Well, there were always exceptions of course, but Owen Paris had certainly never allowed it and she’d always taken a big part of her command style from him. That Tom Paris felt comfortable enough in her presence to treat her like a person rather than a commander who must always be addressed with formality, if not outright respect, came as a pleasant and welcome surprise. She waved him over to the dining table. “Sit. I suppose you’ve had enough time to work out what you might like to eat?”

They agreed on steak, baked potato and vegetables, and settled down to eat.

Finally, Janeway asked the question that had been gnawing at the back of her mind ever since she’d reviewed Paris’ official record.

“Tell me why the Maquis hate you so much?” she half asked, half demanded. He regarded her for a long moment with a very enigmatic smile, and she knew that he knew she’d picked up on the subtle omissions that speckled his file after his discharge from the service.

“We’d been on a raid,” he began. “Munitions and supply depot out near the Bajoran system. It was supposed to be a back-up supply post and not well defended. It was. We came away with nothing except a pounding and a couple of scout ships on our tail. So we ran for the Badlands and lost them in the plasma storms. One of the most exciting days of my life.” He paused to take a few sips of his drink, then continued. “I thought I was beginning to be accepted by the crew, and they warmed up to me quite a bit after I got us down and hidden on one of our boltholes – an asteroid very near the plasma storms. I think maybe even Chakotay couldn’t have got them out of that and he was actually a fair pilot, give the man his due.”

“That doesn’t sound like the basis for blinding hatred,” Janeway commented.

“As I said, at the time we were fine. The ship was in a pretty bad state, supplies were low, and we knew the Cardassians were prowling for us. We couldn’t run for it and get back to one of our better equipped bases – so someone had to go for help. We only had a small one-person runabout that was in working condition. I volunteered. I guess I was still on an adrenaline high and not really thinking about what might happen if I got caught. You’d think with my family background I’d have known better.”

Janeway’s blood suddenly ran cold. “You didn’t get caught by the Cardassians…?” That definitely wasn’t on his file, but there were a whole host of reasons why it could have been excluded.

“It was a hell of a close thing. I had cleared the asteroid belt and was about to set course when my long-range sensors picked up a Cardassian patrol ship coming directly towards the asteroid where the ship was hidden. The base was well disguised, but it wouldn’t have stood up to a closer scan and – well it was like they had a pretty good idea where they should be looking. Anyway, I changed course and faked a fast approach to another nearby asteroid, then cut and run when I was near enough to be noticed, figuring they’d come after me and I could lead them away. Well, that happened, and I went for the plasma storms to try to shake them off. I was smaller and more manoeuvrable and I figured they wouldn’t follow me in too far, I was counting on them cutting round and trying to figure out where I would emerge, and hopefully forget all about the asteroid. At first they latched on to me and I really thought they were going to chase me all the way through. Then they started firing, which is crazy stupid in the Badlands, and just about the time I figured something was going to ignite and blow both of us to hell, they peeled off and I thought I had them beat. Turned out, they were a bit too good at anticipating where I’d come out, and I ended up right on top of them.”

Janeway found herself listening with an echo of the heart-pounding terror she’d experienced back in the blackest days of her life when she’d been captured by the Cardassians. He was a great storyteller, putting enough rythym and inflexion into his tale to draw her into his sense of urgency and panic.

“I was just flashing back to my dad and thinking this was possibly the stupidest thing I’d ever done – and that was up against some pretty strong competition – I couldn’t get away from them, but I managed to just keep out of tractor range and I was just starting to consider whether self-destructing might be a bit better than being captured, when I saw the Bradbury on long range. I didn’t want to be caught by the Federation either but right then, they looked like the answer to a prayer I wasn’t even conscious of making. I took everything off line except for impulse and ran for them. I mean everything, even life support. I had some weird, half-formed idea that maybe I could slip away unnoticed if the Bradbury and the Cardassian patrol went toe to toe but it didn’t turn out that way of course. They got me in a tractor lock and then beamed me aboard and the Cardassian turned tail and ran. Thus ended my promising career in the Maquis. I was returned to Earth, convicted and sentenced so fast it made my head spin. But I never told them where I’d left Chakotay’s crew, and I never told them about any of the other bases either. I did manage to send a single tight-beam burst on the Maquis frequency which I just hoped someone would pick up and act on, but it wasn’t enough to tell any non-maquis where Chakotay’s crew were hiding.”

“So how…?”

“I don’t know. A couple of months after I got to New Zealand a new prisoner arrived, an ex-Maquis. Not anyone I knew, but he knew me. Tried to kill me, accused me of selling them out for an easy sentence. Apparently, the base we’d been heading for got raided by a Federation team a couple of days after I was captured. It was a big base, quite a few people escaped and ran straight into the waiting Cardassians. No one survived, only the ones who surrendered to the Federation. Someone came to the conclusion it was me who betrayed them.”

“Which you didn’t.”

“No, but somebody did. Not just to the Federation, but to the Cardassians as well. They went on to attack two other bases and left no survivors. And with the bases that got targeted, it had to be someone in Chakotay’s crew. I was the obvious fall-guy.”

Janeway sat back, thinking it through. “I did wonder why there was no mention in your record of having informed on the Maquis, but I suppose I thought that with an eighteen month sentence when the standard would have been 5 years or more, that you must have done a deal.”

“One of the disadvantages of being the son of an Admiral is that other people sometimes react differently to you than they would to anyone else. To an outsider, it must have made me look guilty as hell.”

“So you got the reduced time because of your name? I can see your father requesting consideration for early parole if you’d behaved yourself, but he’s hardly the sort of man who would have supported preferential treatment.”

“My father would never have soiled his hands, then or later. Someone in the Admiralty requested the board take into consideration my minimum involvement in Maquis activity and my lack of proveable criminality before I was recruited by them. It wasn’t just because I was Admiral Paris’ son, the shorter time I spent in prison, the sooner I could be sent to infiltrate the Maquis as a Federation spy. I don’t doubt that they would have put some pressure on me to agree to something like that.”

“So, if I hadn’t come along, someone else would have offered you a deal eventually, is that what you’re saying?”

He shook his head. “Once they realised the Maquis blamed me for those bases, that option was out of the window. The whole idea was a bit dim, really, if you think about it. Even if they hadn’t been attacked, anyone in the Maquis could have put two and two together and concluded that reduced sentence probably meant behind the scenes deal. I suppose they were counting on people coming to the same conclusion you just said. Admiral’s son, preferential treatment. But that wouldn’t exactly have given the Maquis reason to trust me either.”

She considered the situation he’d been left in. “Somebody really boxed you in and left you without any options.”

He nodded, looking very solemn. “Somebody who is probably on this ship right now.”

She knew he was right but at the same time there were other possibilities to consider. “It could have been one of the people who were killed in that first fight with the Kazon. If they knew you had any idea about someone in that crew being a traitor they wouldn’t have left you alive this long.”

“The only one on board with security clearance to see that detail in my records is you. I’ve been counting on that, playing up the ‘bad boy, don’t give a crap’ angle on the assumption it makes them feel more secure. Anyway, they wouldn’t have showed their hand. They’d have gone under deep cover and hoped to ride it out. Even arranging an ‘accident’ would have brought suspicion on them.”

He was right of course, and reminded her yet again that he’d been born into a family which had been playing galactic politics for as long as there had been a Federation to play politics in. “That is never going to reconcile you with the rest of the crew though, is it.”

He shrugged. “That ship sailed a long time ago.”

“Have you even given any thought as to how you can change their attitude towards you?”

“Making converts, one person at a time. Maybe I just need a little help doing that. After all, this has been a good week, as weeks on Voyager go.”

“That’s certainly the long term approach.”

“We appear to have nothing but time.”

“We may have very little time, if what you overheard is true.”

He took a long moment to reply, as though debating internally whether to bring up a topic that maybe he felt wouldn’t be well received. “Seska’s not the only problem here – not by a long shot.”

“If you have other suspects as well then it’s best we make sure Tuvok is keeping an eye on them too.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She’d figured that, but was still working out how to respond in a way that didn’t make him retreat back into surface conversation. She sensed he was still very undecided about whether or not to say what was on his mind. “I’m not a mind reader, Mr Paris, and you of all people must appreciate that a captain must be in possession of all the facts to be able to lead effectively.”

He leaned forward a little, "Captain, may I speak freely?"

"Go ahead." It seemed the very least she should allow, under the circumstances.

She could see the decision cross his face as it was made, and his expression hardened slightly. He was going to level with her. That was good, but he was clearly concerned about how the message was going to be received. She tried to put herself into a neutral frame of mind.

"Your first officer allows his feelings to rule his behaviour. He didn't like having the non-Starfleet crew here in the first place. I don't know much about what he was like before, although the way he glared at me when I first came on board I can guess, but since we got here he's been… I think he might be a bit unhinged."

She opted for the cautious, diplomatic response, "I will agree he doesn't seem to respond well to long-term stress."

"That's putting it mildly."

"Unfortunately, there's not a great deal I can do about it. The mission didn't require a counsellor on board, so we don't have one. And it's doubly important in a situation like this that protocol and discipline be maintained, or the crew will become fragmented and incapable of functioning."

"But it's happening already."

She frowned, "Explain that statement."

"It's bad enough to be stranded out here in the first place, but when you've got a senior officer who throws his weight about like Cavit does… Captain, if the crew were at home under a ship routine like this, they could request transfers or they could even resign and leave Starfleet, and once they were out from under him, you can just guarantee it would be dealt with. Here, they're trapped, there's nowhere for them to go.”

“Everyone who commits to a life in Starfleet is made aware of the possibility that they may never go home. Both of our families are examples of that. It comes with the territory, something you accept.”

“I don’t question that for a moment but - it’s a question of degree, isn’t it?”

“You are going to have to explain that statement, I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

Paris sat back and regarded her for a long moment before continuing. “Starfleet’s not a military organisation, even though it has the same rank structure. It doesn’t have the same authority over its people that a real military organisation would have. That’s why there are so many checks and balances, even though they tend to get forgotten when a skirmish comes along. I think quite a few people on this ship have forgotten that.”

She wasn’t sure whether he was lumping her into that group, and tried not to take offence. His words might have pricked a bit but she couldn’t deny they were fair – and accurate, but she had to make her own point, just to feel that this youth wasn’t getting the upper hand in what had turned out to be a much deeper conversation that she’d anticipated.

“This is a Starfleet ship. It’s my responsibility to ensure that however far away we are from the Federation, we continue to uphold Starfleet principles.”

“I disagree.”

She was surprised and not surprised at the same time and couldn’t stop herself from going slightly on the attack, “I suppose you think we should become some kind of roving pirate ship, abandoning our principles and doing whatever we have to to get home.”

He didn’t rise to the bait, and she realised he’d probably had a lifetime of learning to deflect challenges from his demanding father. Owen Paris had always been very strict about the Prime Directive, and she’d had many lectures from him on the subject, lectures she was more than prepared to parrot right back to his son, but yet again he turned her expectation on its head.

“Just the opposite,” he said, then waited for her to react. She couldn’t see where he was going with this, and to avoid another kneejerk reaction she got up, went to the replicator and got them both drink refills – herself a strong black coffee, him another vile green juice. She sat down and sipped for a moment.

“Explain.” She finally said.

He sat in silence thinking for a few seconds, perhaps assembling a cogent argument in his head. Finally he said,

“This isn’t a Starfleet ship any more. More than a quarter of the people on board are civilians. This is a lifeboat. No, it’s more than that, it’s a community, a moving colony.”

“I’m prepared to accept that, to a certain extent,” she allowed.

Paris sat back and thought for a much longer time in silence. He suddenly reminded her so much of his father, sitting in silence and thinking something through before making a decision, or a pronouncement, or issuing an order that he would expect followed immediately and without question. She’d had to wait for Owen Paris because of their relative ranks and his seniority; she waited for Tom out of curiosity and a degree of respect that he’d turned her expectations of him completely around in such a short space of time.

Finally, he started speaking again.

“Starfleet exists for only one reason, to serve the Federation. The Federation exists to serve its citizens. Civilians represent the Federation, and you are governed by the Federation. A Starship captain with civilians on board doesn’t just have a duty of care to them, You have a duty of response as well. Making the civilians work without a voluntary process of recruitment – is a crime, Captain. It used to be called ‘press-ganging’ back in the days long ago when it was considered an acceptable way of acquiring labour to serve on board a ship of the line. It was made illegal hundreds of years ago so technically – you and your officers probably qualify as slavers.”

She stared at him with her mouth open. “That is outrageous!”

He chuckled. “Probably. But how do you think they feel, being drafted without any consultation? That’s acceptable in short term emergency situations back home, but any officer that does it still has to go through an enquiry when the situation’s over, I know that and you know that. Here, in these conditions, this ship has become a prison, not just to the civilians, even for the people who willingly signed up for it. I know what prison does to people, and believe me, this prison isn't as well managed or as 'enlightened' as New Zealand was. I got into a couple of brawls back then and ended up confined to quarters for a few days but nothing worse. I know there are many of the Starfleet crew who feel just as disenfranchised and just as brutalised as the Maquis do. It’s what makes Seska’s threat so real. You’ve done what any Starfleet Captain would do in an emergency situation, certainly what my father would have done; senior officers narrow their focus, go into problem-solving mode, trust that everything else ticks along without any maintenance. But it won’t."

“Well,” she said, still stinging at the accusation and resisting the strong urge to bite back, “If you have such a fine grasp of the situation presumably you also have a solution as to how I integrate a group of Federation criminals into my command structure.”

“And there, right there, is the problem, Captain. They’re not criminals. You went out to the Badlands to capture them so they could be tried for terrorist offences. But until they ARE tried and found guilty they are not criminals. It’s the old ‘us and them’ mentality that all humans tend to fall back on in a crisis. I’m technically the only criminal on board, and once I’ve done my time, Federation law is not entitled to hold that conviction against me in any dealings they have with me. We’re supposed to have an enlightened, fair and just society, and presumption of innocence has been part of Federation Legal structure since the very beginning.”

Janeway was taken completely aback, and realised that he’d nailed a truth that everyone else had been very conveniently ignoring. She wasn’t sure what he was saying they should do about it though. “Are you suggesting a trial?”

For the first time, he showed a little irritation with her, as though he couldn’t believe she was being so obtuse. “I’m suggesting an election.”

She stared at him, in something approaching brainlock, and then comprehension dawned, and she finally got what he was trying to say.

“That’s – clever.” She admitted grudgingly

“Sneaky. Manipulative. Cynical. I learned from the best. But it might work. You need to find a way to bring the Maquis into the decision making process. Having one of them, chosen by them, involved in decisions is going to defuse a lot of tension."

He was so right it hurt, and having been unleashed, as it were, he wasn’t finished yet. He continued before she had the chance to assemble a response.

"Three of your most senior officers are closed minded and judgmental, four if you count Tuvok, who is, well, let’s call it ‘inflexible’, and two of them have vicious streaks. You need to curb their power, and make sure the crew knows what you've done. Living in a strict, unyielding regime is okay if you've signed on for it, as a consenting adult, and you know there's an end in sight. But when there's no possibility of withdrawing your consent, it just becomes abuse. Even the ones who don't eventually hit back - it will affect their job performance, it will affect their self-esteem. In a few years time, going on like this, this ship will be so bursting with stress disorders it won't be able to function."

His reasoning was flawless, and she had no alternative but to accept it, even though the implication – or actually downright accusation – that her ship wasn’t even as well run as a Federation Prison continued to sting.

“This place has to become a community, and if that means dropping some of the Starfleet protocols and flattening out some of the hierarchy, then I think you need to do that,” he concluded.

She wouldn't have credited the Paris Bad Boy with so much socio-political savvy, but then they were the product of the same educational establishment, and must have studied the same core material. Most of the hard-core tactical material Janeway had studied had come in Command School, which had come, for her, long after she’d graduated as an officer. Some students specialised in Command Track right from the third year at the Academy, but she hadn’t seen any indication of Paris having a preponderance of these kinds of classes in his service record. 

“Your father used to teach at Command School, didn’t he?” she asked him. It was a deflection to give her a chance to assimilate and conclude, and he understood that and dialled the intensity down a couple of notches. He switched track to the safer topic smoothly, choosing, as she had observed in him quite a few times now, to defuse tension with some flippancy. 

“He wrote quite a lot of class material too. Explains a lot really.”

“About him, or you?”

“Both, I guess. Once we got past the, ‘he lectures me, I listen in silence’ stage, which I guess was around 12 or 13, we used to have the most vicious arguments. I got exposed to his sources a lot.”

“Let me guess – the Art of War?”

“Sun Tzu, Alexander, Hannibal, Ghengis Khan, every other major tactician in history.” He shook his head disparagingly.

“You don’t approve?” she asked.

He shrugged, and the momentary flippancy faded a little. “They win. There’s a place for them but… to my father, they were the most important influence in his thinking, even in his relationship with me. He was always looking to ‘win’. An argument, a point, a discussion. Add that to a Starfleet-level discipline, and you can maybe understand why I hated him a lot of the time.”

Much of what he described sounded very familiar, but the effect on him was completely alien to her understanding. She too, had grown up under what she felt was a Starfleet-level discipline, although admittedly moderated by her mother, but she had never really rebelled against it. Her long, involved conversations with her father were some of the warmest and happiest memories of her childhood, although she did recall that most of the rebelling (and shouting) had been done by her sister, who had always been a much freer spirit and probably would never have contemplated a career in Starfleet anyway, although it was probably that those heated debates had been responsible for driving her away from an inclination to try for the Academy.

But then her father had always encouraged questioning and always been gentle with his answers, steering her in the right direction of study and encouraging her to find out for herself, and their discussions hadn’t really been focussed around the arts or requirements of command – he had always been happy with the idea that his daughter would become a scientist. Happy and proud. God, she missed him so much, especially now.

The silence stretched on until it became uncomfortable.

“Perhaps I should go now,” Paris said, standing up. “Settle into my new rooms.”

She shook off her melancholy and realised it was rather late.

“It’s been a -stimulating – conversation,” she told him.

He’d clearly picked up on her mood, and his expression looked both sympathetic and contrite. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

She shook her mood off. “You didn’t. You were right, and I don’t have enough people telling me things I need to hear. I’d like you to go on doing it.”

His smile was partly relieved and partly mischievous, “You may end up regretting that.”

“Mr Paris?” She stopped him just as he was about to go through the door. “Just one thing?”

“Yes, Captain?” He paused expectantly, framed in the light from the passageway. The harsh regime he'd been living under hadn't done his body shape any harm, the starvation hadn't gone far enough for that. Abruptly she found that the tall, slimly muscular frame standing poised before her had attracted too much of her attention.

She berated herself severely for letting her mind wander. “You are clearly very good at politics, strategy and tactics. Why do you despise them so much?”

His smile went back to being rather more enigmatic, an expression she was getting used to. “All those things, all the writing about them, have one thing in common. There is no empathy, not one moment of compassion towards the individual. I find that – morally reprehensible.”

He nodded politely and departed.


End file.
